Free Software Linux

I began running this website on Drupal 6 shortly after the official release.  Before then, I periodically installed development version of Drupal 6 on the production server during the weekends so others could judge the progress that was being made.  During this period, I made the claim that I didn't really need any contributed modules to run my site on Drupal 6.

Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal.  According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet (Mnpls). I don't think I've ever met Tim, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a connedtion with the Joomla! Core Team. read more

Warning: Code is really in alpha state, however since this module is one of the most important and overlooked ones out there in terms of i18n, I thought I should mention it on the planet if others may want to pick it up and polish what is pretty much working now. Here is the issue for the drupal-5 port. If you don't know what Active Translation is, from the maintainer: Andrew aka drewish: read more

Packt Publishing announced the five finalists for each category of its 2008 Open Source CMS Award.  Last year, Drupal was the overall winner. Voting for the winners in each of the five categories opens September 1 and ends on October 20, 2008.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges for the top three CMS in each category will then be voted for by a panel of judges.

One of the biggest unknowns for those of us that live in the north central United States...how many Drupal enthusiasts are there in our area?  Not knowing the answer to this question has been bothering me.  I have also been a little disturbed seeing the map so empty of a Drupal user group for my part of the region.  So I'm hoping those of you that are Drupal users from South Dakota and bordering areas will join me and others in the new South Dakota Drupal User Group at groups.drupal.org.

Development of the SMFforum Integration module for Drupal is no longer.  Amy Stephen over at OpenSourceCommunity.org pointed out on her blog that the module's project  leader, "vb", pulled the module due to licensing disagreements with SMF LLC.  Amy references vb's original post at the Drupal forum, but she has a lot more to say.  Amy's an active participant in the Joomla! community, a community which had their own issues with a bridge between Joomla! and SMF. According to vb's post, an email sent by Michael "Oldiesmann" Eshom, Project Manager, Simple Machines LLC stated that:

The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites. Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup - After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

Linux.com is featuring a story by Susan Linton titled "Drupal 6 keeps getting better". The author claims she has been using Drupal since version 3.1 and seems to know Drupal well enough to write a decent article. In short, she does a farily nice job of summarizing the features introduced in Drupal 6. However, she ends the article with a rather strange conclusion. My primary complaint with Drupal is still not addressed in this release. I believe having advertising capabilities is almost a necessity in any content management solution. Instead, Drupal leaves users to their own skills or to use a contributed module. The lack of native advertising support remains a major drawback.

You and I have a dirty little secret. Many of the Web applications that we call content management systems (Web CMS) are not really content management systems. Huh? A lot of this confusion stems from the difficulty most of us have in answering what should be a simple question, what is a content management system? Scott Abel, The Content Wranger, has noted in previous comments that one of the problems in discussions about content management is that we really lack a common definition of CMS.