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In light of the current Drupal release being 6.3, I hope this review will prompt the developers to shift priorities to getting a v6 compatible module out for testing.

In the mean time, you might want to take a look at Ubercart, another Drupal module.

What are you talking about?
Drupals current stable releases are 6.3 and 5.8.

I, and probably many others, would appreciate you mention at least some of all those missing features in Drupal 5.8.

I have been involved in several e-commerce sites developed with Drupal 5.8 and UberCart ( http://www.ubercart.org/ ) and we really don't find much functionality missing. Actually, the Drupal API ( http://api.drupal.org/ ) and available modules is far beyond anything else I've worked with.
Drupal + UberCart is really really good. There is nothing else to say about that.
Developing multi-language e-commerce sites, which conforms to XHTML and CSS standards, with user friendly AJAX enhanced functionality, supporting large number of products (2+ millions) for a large number of visitors, with different payment options is pure joy with Drupal and UberCart.

UberCart is an alternative e-commerce solution for Drupal which is beginning to really stand out from the crowd.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it wouldn't hurt to back up your opinion with some facts/observations.

I've never heard of Drupal before. Is this another flavor of the month software package?

Some programmers think they should be able to do anything they want.

That might be OK if you live in your parents' basement and code for yourself, but in the real world it's a bad (and selfish) idea.

Strict adherence to a standard is helpful in code review and in cases where a component is taken over by a new maintainer.

This is always important, but it's particularly important in a genuinely open, community-driven project.

The Drupal project is an example. It has a coding standard derived from the PEAR project that applies to any code submitted for inclusion in the core.

Contrib authors are encouraged, but not required, to follow it. The good ones do.

The Drupal Coder module does a very good job of nagging at you until you get the formatting right, and also helps with code migration and updating when the API changes. And it finds some common bonehead mistakes that can create security issues.

Adhering to a standard doesn't have to be painful. Using a properly configured text editor helps. There is good support for Drupal standards and conventions in OpenKomodo and the commercial Komodo IDE, as well as some other editors.

Some programmers think they should be able to do anything they want.

That might be OK if you live in your parents' basement and code for yourself, but in the real world it's a bad (and selfish) idea.

Strict adherence to a standard is helpful in code review and in cases where a component is taken over by a new maintainer.

This is always important, but it's particularly important in a genuinely open, community-driven project.

The Drupal project is an example. It has a coding standard derived from the PEAR project that applies to any code submitted for inclusion in the core.

Contrib authors are encouraged, but not required, to follow it. The good ones do.

The Drupal Coder module does a very good job of nagging at you until you get the formatting right, and also helps with code migration and updating when the API changes. And it finds some common bonehead mistakes that can create security issues.

Adhering to a standard doesn't have to be painful. Using a properly configured text editor helps. There is good support for Drupal standards and conventions in OpenKomodo and the commercial Komodo IDE, as well as some other editors.

Not the same as saying that he didn't want java to be OO.

Oh, no, that's not the point at all. The point is this:

OO != Classes

And in fact that Classes may not be the ideal way to orient a program around objects. And the bonus point is that the person who implemented what's the arguable current king of OO languages understands this. He's not the only one. The Drupal Devs also have a thing or two to say on the subject.

I'm very familiar with the Allen Holub article you referenced -- stumbled across it three or four years ago, and it eventually led me to buy Holub's book on patterns. The takeaway point about the hazards of implementation inheritance is one that I think he overstates, but it's absolutely necessary given the way most people learn OO programing these days. Most books and tutorials hammer on extends and necessarily use examples of class hierarchies because it's necessary to teach what all the OO syntax does, but this really isn't what OO programming is about.

The interesting thing is that Javascript is one of the few popular languages where this is quite clear. There are weak clases, there is no "extends", and therefore very little magic implementation inheritance. You can code up syntax for this, if you like, as many of the major libraries do, which I think illustrates the power of the model and the language, but by and large, the prototype inheritance method means that you're doing interface inheritance or very explicit implementation sharing. This means the pitfalls Holub points out are easier to avoid, and there's many other bonuses. It also unfortunately means a bit extra work in some cases where implementation inheritance is handy and less dangerous, but it's not all that much, and I think the tradeoff is worth it.

Now, the next version of Javascript will particularly be nice for developers of libraries who have reasons not to trust the developers using what they're producing, because they'll be able to freeze things they can't freeze now with the static typing and class definitions.

But I'm pretty afraid a prevalent culture that seems to have a fairly narrowly scoped idea of object orientation and "best practices" is going to clap their hands and grab onto the familiar classes as they approach Javascript, rather than really understand the breadth of the language, and in 3-4 years, you'll have newly-minted team leads fresh from their recent readings of Fowler and GoF talking about tortured design patterns using static types and classes when a little sprinkling of dynamic language will do the job.

Please, allay my fears by not saying "JS2 finally bring real OO programming to Javascript."

Google Sync, Del.icio.us, etc. are spiffy, but I want to control my own data. I have a webserver and the willingness to get in over my head, so what's a geek to do to host this for himself? I'd settle for just keeping the bookmarks.

I have a Drupal 5 site up and running. Ideally, I'd like to be able to add a bunch of bookmarks to it, then make an RSS feed of them. Then I could let my browsers turn that feed into bookmark folders. Unfortunately, I've only been able to get an RSS feed of links to pages on my own site, and then would have to clink on the links on those pages to get to the real sites (example: my bookmark would be to mysite/bookmarks/slashdot, and that page would have a link to here). Ick. Has anyone else had success with such a thing?

>I don't know any web developer that uses or likes Joomla.

I do. I also been setting up systems to a number of large and small corporations and schools that are more than happy with Joomla.

Joomla maybe isn't for the the programmer type of webdevelopers themselves - they could write their own CMS if they wish/could - but for the publishers who simply want something up and running and than add/remove functions. Joomla give you that. Drupal needs someone to give it a fresh shiny, publisher friendly look exposing it's features when installed by someone who doesn't understand php at all. Look at a no-frills Drupal install w default template, it looks feature-less and plain. Joomla while rather boxy looking atleast it shows of lot's feature in matters of minutes of beeing downloaded.

Joomla is a system that's easy for a designer to do a template for. Yes it really is if you know CMSes and look into a template. Look at XOOPS , EZPublish or Typo3 - absolutely horrible. I say no to anyone asking for EZPublish.

Of course Joomla has it's flaws, the very limited fixed section/category way of organizing articles/pages, still many default modules gives you tablebased code as it looked in 1994, no support for GD built in, no built-in support for auth. against LDAP or other system, I could go on for ever.

Many other open CMSes has the similar oddities and/or misses out on the same obvious features maybe because there are no publishers involved in the development of the functions. Get them involved!

>I've been developing websites since the late 80's
Eh.. no, you haven't.

My main annoyance with Joomla is that it doesn't do blogging very well. The Joomla dev team use WordPress themselves. That and I dislike the workflow.

I'm currently using Drupal to build a site for a local social centre and further looking to create an install package that's got preconfigured settings and modules for easy and practical out-of-the-box usage by users who may have little CMS experience. The problem with Drupal 6 is that there are a number of heavily used non-core modules that haven't been ported from Drupal 5 yet. CCK (custom forms) is in alpha. Panels 2 b5 (nifty layouts) for Drupal 5 was released last week with the D6 port due after the final is out. The other big hitter from what I've been able to gather is Views (custom content presentation), but that's already at beta3 for D6. I'm betting that once these are all final for D6 that more users will upgrade which will in turn drive mod devs to start on D6 porting.

Drupal seems very flexible and a good middle-of-the-road CMS. It doesn't have the fantastic individual centric user interface for posting content that you get in WordPress or Movable Type, but most of what the average user will see is customizable. Still the best of a bad bunch though ;)

My main annoyance with Joomla is that it doesn't do blogging very well. The Joomla dev team use WordPress themselves. That and I dislike the workflow.

I'm currently using Drupal to build a site for a local social centre and further looking to create an install package that's got preconfigured settings and modules for easy and practical out-of-the-box usage by users who may have little CMS experience. The problem with Drupal 6 is that there are a number of heavily used non-core modules that haven't been ported from Drupal 5 yet. CCK (custom forms) is in alpha. Panels 2 b5 (nifty layouts) for Drupal 5 was released last week with the D6 port due after the final is out. The other big hitter from what I've been able to gather is Views (custom content presentation), but that's already at beta3 for D6. I'm betting that once these are all final for D6 that more users will upgrade which will in turn drive mod devs to start on D6 porting.

Drupal seems very flexible and a good middle-of-the-road CMS. It doesn't have the fantastic individual centric user interface for posting content that you get in WordPress or Movable Type, but most of what the average user will see is customizable. Still the best of a bad bunch though ;)

My main annoyance with Joomla is that it doesn't do blogging very well. The Joomla dev team use WordPress themselves. That and I dislike the workflow.

I'm currently using Drupal to build a site for a local social centre and further looking to create an install package that's got preconfigured settings and modules for easy and practical out-of-the-box usage by users who may have little CMS experience. The problem with Drupal 6 is that there are a number of heavily used non-core modules that haven't been ported from Drupal 5 yet. CCK (custom forms) is in alpha. Panels 2 b5 (nifty layouts) for Drupal 5 was released last week with the D6 port due after the final is out. The other big hitter from what I've been able to gather is Views (custom content presentation), but that's already at beta3 for D6. I'm betting that once these are all final for D6 that more users will upgrade which will in turn drive mod devs to start on D6 porting.

Drupal seems very flexible and a good middle-of-the-road CMS. It doesn't have the fantastic individual centric user interface for posting content that you get in WordPress or Movable Type, but most of what the average user will see is customizable. Still the best of a bad bunch though ;)

"Can't seem to remember OSS being used by any other presidential candidate in the past, ever."

Totally disagree. The "Views" and "CCK" (Content Construction Kit) modules are Drupal as far as I'm concerned and should really be a part of Drupal core. For those uninitiated, they basically give you a web-interface for building "content types" you want to store on your Web site and then displaying them.

Put another way, the two modules combined lets you store and retrieve whatever kind of information you can imagine on your web site-- special types of messages, product reviews, baseball card collections, your favorite movies, invitations, whatever you can think of.

Basically its abstracting SQL table creation, querying, and formatting without you having to know what any of that means. And using it, your site can store, retrieve, and display just about any kind of data. Really easily.

A friend who has zero programming experience-- certainly has never administered a database before-- sat down with me for about an hour and I explained what CCK and Views did... and within a few day he was using it like a pro.

I have no idea if Joomla has anything similar, but at least on Drupal I don't think it's so hard as to recommend "avoiding" them on a first site. If you screw something up, it's easy to just remove it and start over...

Totally disagree. The "Views" and "CCK" (Content Construction Kit) modules are Drupal as far as I'm concerned and should really be a part of Drupal core. For those uninitiated, they basically give you a web-interface for building "content types" you want to store on your Web site and then displaying them.

Put another way, the two modules combined lets you store and retrieve whatever kind of information you can imagine on your web site-- special types of messages, product reviews, baseball card collections, your favorite movies, invitations, whatever you can think of.

Basically its abstracting SQL table creation, querying, and formatting without you having to know what any of that means. And using it, your site can store, retrieve, and display just about any kind of data. Really easily.

A friend who has zero programming experience-- certainly has never administered a database before-- sat down with me for about an hour and I explained what CCK and Views did... and within a few day he was using it like a pro.

I have no idea if Joomla has anything similar, but at least on Drupal I don't think it's so hard as to recommend "avoiding" them on a first site. If you screw something up, it's easy to just remove it and start over...

The problem with CMSs (specifically the more bare-bones ones to which you're supposed to add plugins, like Drupal), is that, well, as I said, they need plugins to make themselves useful, and sometimes the plugins don't work together well or don't mesh with one another.

It might be just me, but last January I decided I wanted to create a profissional-looking (or at least profissional-working) newspaper site as a hobby. I know The Onion and Schamper and a whole lot of other online newspapers run on Drupal, but it certainly wasn't "simple" to do, even with custom logic coding. Views likes CCK but not some of its addons, theming a CCK node is complicated and a View of a CCK node doubly so, especially if you want to show news separated by Taxonomy classification on the front page, like most news sites do.

After convincing myself that if I were to use a CMS for that site, it would have to be Drupal, I started thinking it would just be a lot easier to code something which worked exactly the way I had in mind... of course, I'm only an amateur programmer who can do slightly decent Perl and, by extension, PHP, so even though I have read a bunch of books on common web application security holes (and associated techniques like CHAP login, session fixation prevention, etc.) the general opinion of the Internet was that "coding your own CMS is an even worse idea".

Anyway, I'm rambling, but the point is I never got said hobby site working. Maybe if I really had to get it done I could have achieved it (probably by cutting corners and making compromises), but to this day, short of custom-coding, I don't really see a minimally straightforward way of setting up a newspaper-style site (and, relatedly, while googling extensively on the topic I came across a /. post on the subject -- the consensus was Drupal). There's also Expression Engine and a host of whole other commercial CMSs, but at that point you might as well throw in a bit more cash and have the company customize it for you, which takes the fun out of the "hobby" process.

If only so many of the really useful modules weren't pay-to-play.

Major kudos to Drupal.org's policy of only allowing GPLed modules into their download directory.

Roles stink

No they don't. See, I produced as much evidence as you did, so I am equally correct.

grants priority is a bug-prone disaster (along with all use of weight in general -- an aspect-oriented pre/post require system is what's needed, which, by the way, is neatly described with an RDF ontology--yet again, too bad Drupal can't actually describe those...)

Wow, thanks for the whining instead of helping with the many proposals for implementing this functionality. If you don't help it won't get done, monkey-cock.

yeah. I still use it, but it's not fun, and there is a whole category of requests that I get where my answer is "wait a few years and maybe it will be solved".

People like you are holding back the whole Open Source movement. You're quite happy to use the Drupal code, bitch about it on Slashdot, but won't even provide a single patch. Hope you realise what a cunt you're being.

Patches welcome, prick-tits.

Roles stink

No they don't. See, I produced as much evidence as you did, so I am equally correct.

grants priority is a bug-prone disaster (along with all use of weight in general -- an aspect-oriented pre/post require system is what's needed, which, by the way, is neatly described with an RDF ontology--yet again, too bad Drupal can't actually describe those...)

Wow, thanks for the whining instead of helping with the many proposals for implementing this functionality. If you don't help it won't get done, monkey-cock.

yeah. I still use it, but it's not fun, and there is a whole category of requests that I get where my answer is "wait a few years and maybe it will be solved".

People like you are holding back the whole Open Source movement. You're quite happy to use the Drupal code, bitch about it on Slashdot, but won't even provide a single patch. Hope you realise what a cunt you're being.

Patches welcome, prick-tits.

Modules are currently not themed through any kind of centralized system.

Not sure what you mean by this. The theme() function is incredibly powerful for theming the smallest details. Not all modules do a good job of using it -- hey, it's open source and free -- but it's not hard to add theming functions to them. Requires programming skills, yes, but that's why Drupal is best thought of as a framework. It's certainly a heck of a lot more flexible than WordPress (which I generally like).

Well, Drupal -IS- a framework, and to this date by far the best framework I have worked with.
I'm guessing here that you have never looked at Drupal and the way it is built? Your last sentence give you away. "Hacking" Drupal is something which is very very very rarely needed. After 50 Drupal sites we still have not had the need to to "hack Drupal" - sites which some you really could not tell were running Drupal, others are large e-commerce sites and some just plain CMSs.

The GP here sounds clueless. If you want to meet deadlines, use something like Drupal.
I've coded frameworks and CMS/E-commerce systems from scratch. I've used Mambo, WordPress and some frameworks. Been into OsCommerce, which was my worst experience with any system - hands down.
The company I'm a part of run ~20 onlines stores (from some very large to rather small) and about 70 other CMS/company sites (some large). And right now we are porting everything to Drupal / UberCart - www.ubercart.org (best commerce extension for Drupal).
Just hearing someone mention "coding my own system" makes me shudder. Either they are totally clueless or fresh out of school. There is no other excuse. Really!

There is absolutely no way one person or a small company can compete with a system like Drupal. You simply don't have enough time and resources to code something with as many bells and whistles, supporting new standards, and with such an API ad Drupal has. The API is to die for. The modules, and here we ARE talking about real stand alone - easy to install - no messing up other code/core - modules, are just "kick ass". Just look at the available modules for Drupal.

Axed this from BuisnessWeek:
"(Drupal) which is used by Sony BMG Music, Warner Music Group (WMG), Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Time Warner's (TWX) AOL, Amnesty International, and more than 250,000 other companies to manage their Web sites."

A lot of government and educational sites in my country are being "upgraded" to Drupal.

For anyone wanting to have a look at the technical aspects of Drupal: http://api.drupal.org/

Um...if you're upgrading from one major version to another you'll want to use the correct version of the module. If you're not familiar with Drupal's mechanisms for updating, perhaps you should become more informed. Most competent people use CVS or one of the contributed modules like CVS deploy.

I think you are confused as to what an API is. And the "home brewed objects" you speak of are not "real" PHP objects because PHP's object implementation has sucked until PHP 5.2.x. Now that it is better, Drupal's next release (Drupal 7) will be PHP 5 only and have more use of PHP 5's objects. In the meantime, Drupal has been able to run on the huge number of hosts that resisted PHP 5.

Drupal does have the same problems other CMS's have, but in most cases Drupal has an elegant solution for it. For example, module writers have the ability to write update functions so that any changes they make in data schema, persistent variables, etc. are executed when the module is upgraded. This whole "consultants want Drupal to stay difficult" argument is thrown around occasionally, and it is not what I have experienced at all in the Drupal community, which does not consist primarily of consultants.

MVC has nothing to do with security and scalability (other than "separation of logic and presentation makes them both easier"). Drupal uses a separation of content and presentation sometimes called PAC.

Scalability has to do with intelligent caching, of which Drupal has plenty. Its pluggable cache system lets you use a database, flat files, or memcache for caching.

Security has to do with how code is written and how many eyes are on it. Code is written according to Drupal's coding standards, and developers learn to write secure code or they are slapped around by Drupal's dedicated security team.

The terminology is not vague. Modules are modular code components. Themes are the way things look. Slashdot itself was the originator of the term "block". And a view is...just what you'd expect.

Open source in general suffers from "good enough for my site". If you want great code you either become a developer and write it or you sponsor a developer. Drupal's community is like any in open source. There are superstars who write awesome code, and people just getting started who are finding their way. A site like drupalmodules.com can help you tell which modules were written by which people.

Drupal's tagging was one of the first to do full taxonomic implementation with multiple controlled vocabularies, not like most CMS's that thought a single "Categories" or "Tags" was enough. The simple "free tagging" option was added later.

Drupal's releases are getting farther apart and with the advent of commercially supported Drupal API stability is growing.

Contradiction complete.

I bought the book and wish I didn't. The book is more for folks who don't know PHP, CSS, HTML, etc.

The Handbooks on the Drupal site are much better than the book. You can find the beginner's cookbook here...

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook

And the tutorials here...

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials

Drupal is good for quick website development and comes with a ton of modules for added functionality. It's a good way to go if you know PHP or if you want to provide an easy way for non-HTML literate folks to add content. Version 6 and above are better architected and nicely modular. You can get a lot of function without reinventing the wheel and if you need more functionality than is available in the wealth of core modules and contributed modules you can develop and plug in your own modules. And if your modules are any good you can contribute them back to the user community.

Of course, if you're not interested in productivity and you feel a need to reinvent wheels and do everything yourself then you just ignore open source CMS in general.

I bought the book and wish I didn't. The book is more for folks who don't know PHP, CSS, HTML, etc.

The Handbooks on the Drupal site are much better than the book. You can find the beginner's cookbook here...

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook

And the tutorials here...

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials

Drupal is good for quick website development and comes with a ton of modules for added functionality. It's a good way to go if you know PHP or if you want to provide an easy way for non-HTML literate folks to add content. Version 6 and above are better architected and nicely modular. You can get a lot of function without reinventing the wheel and if you need more functionality than is available in the wealth of core modules and contributed modules you can develop and plug in your own modules. And if your modules are any good you can contribute them back to the user community.

Of course, if you're not interested in productivity and you feel a need to reinvent wheels and do everything yourself then you just ignore open source CMS in general.

I was able to install Drupal and I never had any experience whatsoever installing a CMS over FTP.

I used this screencast and it was a breeze.

Hi,

I was having a discussion not long ago with a colleague. I was proposing using Drupal has the framework for a web application. I've done it with a lot of success in other small projects.

He objected that it was too big for what we needed. At the end, he agreed that we needed a framework. So he proposed zend. I know that zend can be used with Drupal to make modules.

For me, building a Drupal module would make sense. The application is a big RSS aggregator. We could use drupal for user management, right management and others. But more importantly, we can use Drupal also has a framework. We can even use Zend over it.

What do you think about it? Would you base a web application that need user, right management and other standard web stuff on Drupal even if the core business of the application is not really supported by Drupal?

• Audio interview with Dmitri.
  
• Dmitri's profile on drupal.org
  

• Audio interview with Dmitri.
  
• Dmitri's profile on drupal.org
  

... which is exactly the thinking behind the Zen theme, which was in contention for being the default Drupal theme at the time Drupal 5 was being developed.

Having used a stripped down version of Zen as my starting point for all my themes since Drupal 5 came out over a year ago, I can say that things never work out that simply on any non-trivial site. You always end up hacking HTML somewhere. On refection I think the price you pay for all the crufty wrapper divs needed to provide you with hooks for (almost, but never entirely) every CSS selector you might reasonably want in a theme is just too high. If Firebug is an absolute necessity for understanding your own markup, then you're doing something wrong.

In Drupal 6, customising HTML output will become a lot easier for non-programmers, as a lot of stuff that previously required a PHP theme function to override, can now be overriden by template files in your theme directory.

Drupal often gets criticized by newcomers who believe that object-oriented programming (OOP) is always the best way to design software architecture, and since they do not see the word "class" in the Drupal code, it must be inferior to other solutions. In fact, it is true that Drupal does not use many of the OOP features of PHP, but it is a mistake to think that the use of classes is synonymous with object-oriented design. This article will cover several of the features of Drupal from an object-oriented perspective, so programmers comfortable with that paradigm can begin to feel at home in the Drupal code base, and hopefully be able to choose the right tool for the job.

If you read the Drupal theme developer's guide you'd know that basic Drupal theming works exactly that way. A page template is simply an HTML page with tags inserted where you want specific components to appear.

The power of Drupal's approach to theming is that you can do as little, or as much, customization of detailed component formatting as you want.

It's a site development platform, not simple blogware that lets you play with look and feel. This is why the Onion, HamptonRoads.com, New York Observer and Ozzy Osborne's website can all run Drupal but not look or act like my weblog or JumpTV.

Why when you can view everything you need to know about Drupal themes (including version 6+) here. You basically unpack the theme, put it in the themes directory, and go into the admin panel to enable it.

There, I just condensed 260 pages that costs money into something free and easy to do. As far as modifying your CSS to find your custom needs, well, that's for a completely different book and one that I would actually read -- if it helped more than what I've been able to learn myself online.

Last year, many people(like myself) started using CMS, since free CMS:es like Drupal and Joomla now has reached a level of usability where they save so much developing time that it can't be ignored anymore. In fact, I'd say that not using them would, in most web development projects, be irresponsible and bordering on stupid.

So I predict, that from this year and forward, it will become way harder for consulting firms to charge customers lots of money to, for the millionth time, develop the same GUI:s and content handling mechanisms that most web sites need.
An other thing is that so many of these firms so unaware of the threat they are facing, that this will come as a complete shock.
"What, did our competitor offer a same or higher level of sofistication for a TENTH of our price?".

1. Boredom
2. Curiousity
3. Anything you can do I can do better (*)
4. Spite
5. Others don't have feature X
6. Control of the code

No-one's under an obligation to use a new version of a licence,

They are if they use/modify AGPL code. Say, for example, that I have a website based on Drupal. If Drupal adopts the AGPL, any modifications I make to Drupal must now be released, either by contributing them back to the project, or as sources I supply myself.

From the download page:

Note: Drupal works with PHP 4 & 5. If you need support for the newest PHP 5.2, however, you must use Drupal 5.1 (and higher) or Drupal 4.7.5 (and higher)

Beyond that, why would you care? Either it has the features you're looking for or it doesn't. It's expected that the majority of users of such a thing will just want to install and use it, not hack on it. Put another way, off the top of my head I don't know whether Firefox is written in C or C++ and don't really care. As an end user, it doesn't matter to me. So it is with Drupal for most of its audience.

Do not read that as a defense of PHP. I personally can't stand the language. That doesn't stop me from thinking that Drupal itself is a brilliant solution for the needs I had, any more than I'd stop liking Firefox if I found out that it was written in Visual Cobol--.

I love Python. In fact, I wrote a short magazine article about how much I like it (although I admit that the promised sequel never materialized; sorry Tony). Having said that, working with Plone was like pulling teeth. It's obviously a nice system with huge potential and excellent customization options, but the learning curve is enormously steep.

We ended up abandoning our Plone intentions and moving toward Drupal for pre-made CMS stuff; even if I don't like hacking in PHP, hundreds of other people have already done most of the work for just about anything we might conceivably want to do. For true web application development beyond content management, we switched to Django and haven't looked back. If you already know Python, Django's learning curve is exceedingly shallow.

I don't hate Plone. It's just that it didn't seem to offer anything more than its competition, and that's from someone who already built a large web application in Zope (which is the platform Plone is built upon). Having said that, this book and others like it can hopefully make it a lot easier to get started with Plone development. It has great possibilities if you can get past the startup cost.

Indeed, and the first version of the module that encapsulates this functionality dates back to 2003, way before the time when the patent was filed.

If your code is PHP, and considering what it's strengths are (the forum display and experience rather than the user registration management, for instance) you may want to look into converting it to a Drupal module and releasing it-- rather more likely to have a user and a developer community this way, though it would be a lot to learn for just one project.

We also redid the Flex.org showcase with Drupal. http://flex.org/showcase/ http://drupal.org/node/177266 Mike Developer Marketing Manager Adobe Systems Inc.

Note: This tutorial is based on an example by Alexander Crugnola, in the example, Flex with AMFPHP. Please note that Alexander Crugnola's example is not specific to Drupal.

Yesterday the Adobe Flex team launched a Drupal powered application that showcases applications built with Adobe Flex. The new Flex Showcase is online now at http://flex.org/showcase_app.

The backend of the application uses Drupal, along with the Services, AMFPHP, Vote up / down and CCK modules. The front end of the application is written in Adobe Flex, with custom components written in Flash.

Drupal was chosen for the application because we needed a PHP framework that supported user registration and management, content management, categorization and tagging, and comments. Drupal was the best choice for these services, and with the work that Scott Nelson had already done with the Services and AMFPHP modules, the choice was easy.

For all of you Drupal admins out there, I just wanted to let you know that there is a reCAPTCHA module that makes using reCAPTCHA a snap.

I'm not affiliated with the project, other than as a happy, comment-spam-free user of it.

Plus drupal already has integrations to google maps; http://drupal.org/project/gmap

The organization that I work for is going to be redoing our website in .Net/AJAX.

I don't particularly prefer WordPress, and while recently considering various blogging tools for my new blogs and a new website service offering hosted blogs that I am designing, I ended up building my own tool based on some pre-existing code: I got Drupal's HEAD and I am currently modifying its blog module to create exactly what I perceive as the perfect blogging tool for me and the blog service I am going to launch. I'll provide patches or a complete new blog module to the Drupal project when I finish the preliminary testing of my changes. I liked Drupal's blog module for its simplicity and small size, as I had a good base (posting system and Drupal's blog API support) to start adding features to, without having to worry about breaking an existing large complex system. I found Drupal's blog module easy to customise, so I think it's a good platform to base your own blog on, especially if you know PHP programming and you have special requirements that are not solved by existing packages (like in my case). So, if you feel that WP or MT or any other blogging tool does not fully suit you, I encourage you to have a look at Drupal and modify it to create the perfect solution just for you. After all, a blog is something personal and must fully express your individuality and personality, and this cannot be done simply by changing a theme, as the software code itself is also an expression of your personality, so my idea is that if you want a fully personalised blog you should run your own blog engine too.

How timely.

A friend blogged about SciVee which is intended to be Youtube for scientists.

And it runs on Drupal.

Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? In specific, I'm curious if there are other projects like SugarCRM. I know about all the different Wikipedia projects.