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I'm not a very skilled from-scratch PHP developer, but I like building on Drupal. Here's a look at how they handle PHP:

1. Until PHP 4.2.0, REGISTER_GLOBALS was set to ON, meaning that variables from a GET, POST or COOKIE are automatically defined as variables. Insert rules about how globals are evil here.
   - Drupal turns off REGISTER_GLOBALS in its default config
2. Classes in PHP4 are horribly broken. They don't have destructors, for instance. PHP5 is better, but the install base of 5 is so low that writing software means having to appeal to PHP4 and 5. What's PHP4's general solution to not having a destructor? Register_shutdown_function(). Ew.
   - No solution in Drupal that I can see.
3. Using XML / XSL is a great way to use a templating language within PHP. However, the libraries between PHP4 and PHP5 are entirely different, so you have to write a wrapper if you want your PHP code working on PHP4 and PHP5. Or... install an unsupported PECL module. Smarty? No thanks.
   - Drupal uses seperate .tpl.php files in a theme directory as templates. They encourage putting your PHP print()'s in the HTML, not the other way around. Most functions in core and contrib used for presentation are overridable by themes. Just create phptemplate_foo() to override foo(), or node.tpl.php to override a whole module's presentation.
4. On most setups I've seen, MAGIC_QUOTES are turned on. This means if you're writing something for wide use, you'll have to use stripslashes() to get them out of GET or POST. Even worse, some boxes have MAGIC_QUOTES_RUNTIME on, so you'll have to use stripslashes on anything coming back from a database.
   MAGIC_QUOTES is turned off in the default Drupal config.
5. Safe mode is one of the most annoying things to work with. I see sysadmins use it as a horrible band-aid for shared hosting (what the hell ever happened to apache and the perchild MPM?). Open_basedir is annoying too.
   - Drupal can be used with Safe Mode on or off. I only have experience with using it on shared hosting with it off.
6. Try, catch, and throw are PHP5 only, meaning that error handling ends up being done by something stupid like set_error_handler().
   - I'm not sure how Drupal handles errors, but it does work just as well with PHP5 as PHP4.
7. Namespaces, namespaces, namespaces!
   - That's one thing that bugs me about Drupal. The devs believe that their modules and themes systems cover enough aspects of OO programming that they don't need to actually switch to OO. Rather than wrap their functions in a class for each module, they encourage contrib devs to prefix their module functions with mymodule_.

I'm not sure if that was worth posting, but it probably does make sense to point out that most people who use PHP probably use a framework/CMS on top of PHP. That framework may or may not have the same problems as PHP.

I care, but unfortunately certain browser developers don't give a rat's ass, so attempting to get a page to render perfectly in ALL major browsers without being ultra-conservative and without having to rely on browser hacks like quirks mode or conditional comments is not an easy task.

Furthermore, many open source projects generate HTML output that is so far from compliant that it's easier to just give up and rely on quirks and conditional comments to make things work, in comparison to spending the many man-weeks it would take to fix rendering problem of the various modules and plugins one would often use in conjunction with those projects.

Rather than a newsgroup or a wiki, a forum would also work.

Drupal is a great way to work collaboratively. Threaded comments, different content types; pretty much everything you'd need. Internal scheduling isn't very robust.

Something like phpGroupware would work as well (I suppose that's what it's for, eh?)

A few months ago, I was asked by a client to develop an e-store using OSCommerce.

After looking at what the client wanted and what OSCommerce offered, I recommended going with Drupal instead. Admittedly, the e-commerce side of Drupal wasn't as robust as what OSCommerce offered, but Drupal's superior API, highly-customizable theming engine, and well-documented codebase made it the preferred choice IMO. I had to write some custom code to support the e-commerce options the client wanted, but it didn't take more than a few days.

After reading everyone else's painful experiences with OSCommerce, I'm doubly glad I avoided it.

(And for those who care, the store is here.)

I've set up a Drupal store for a client. I've written patches for Drupal ecommerce.

Drupal is a well designed system. The ecommerce module is not in the core. It's an add on and for the most part it's also well-designed.

Drupal and the ecomm modules have pluginability as a key feature, which has lead to very quick development. However, I think that touting ecomm as a good offering is premature. It is improving very quickly, but it's not ready yet to compete with professional solutions. For instance - it only recently aquired a tax subsystem, it doesn't yet have a general purpose shipping choice module and the cart workflow is not polished.

If you need a simple store and you don't sell complex products, it's good enough for you at the moment. If you are thinking of something more complex and can wait a while, come and have a look now, and try it out in a few months time. You can find Drupal here and the ecomm module here.

I've set up a Drupal store for a client. I've written patches for Drupal ecommerce.

Drupal is a well designed system. The ecommerce module is not in the core. It's an add on and for the most part it's also well-designed.

Drupal and the ecomm modules have pluginability as a key feature, which has lead to very quick development. However, I think that touting ecomm as a good offering is premature. It is improving very quickly, but it's not ready yet to compete with professional solutions. For instance - it only recently aquired a tax subsystem, it doesn't yet have a general purpose shipping choice module and the cart workflow is not polished.

If you need a simple store and you don't sell complex products, it's good enough for you at the moment. If you are thinking of something more complex and can wait a while, come and have a look now, and try it out in a few months time. You can find Drupal here and the ecomm module here.

CVS is antiquated by today's standards.

It suffers from several drawbacks, and SVN does address those.

For example, if you move or rename a file or directory in CVS, you lose its history.

Supposed you have a file called foo.c that you have been committing to for months, and then decide that instead of being in directory src/blah, it should be src/blat. Or if you want it to be simply bar.c. You do a cvs remove and then a cvs add, and bingo: you lost all the history of that file. It will go back to 1.1.

SVN handles that nicely.

The other thing in SVN is that commits are set at a time, not file at a time. Each commit has a unique number that spans all the files, and you can arbitrarity branch the entire project at any point back, without the need to have a tag.

Those are from my own experience. I have been using CVS for the past years, both professionally and in open source projects that I contribute to (have you done any Drupal lately?).

CVS is showing its age. SVN is much better.

Thanks. It's actually running on Drupal with a slash theme. I've contributed some modules that that project and I like it a lot. I'll give look at bash.org. Thanks!

I'm increasingly of the opinion that for all but the simplest of sites, there just aren't any good "off the shelf" content management systems, unless you have no problem with your site looking like the default installation of whichever CMS you chose.

Here's the logic:
1. A very basic site (read: a blog) with a very basic CMS is generally not hard to set up.

2. The technical issue: as sites get more complicated, the level of sophistication required by the user to install and maintain them increases. (In the extreme case, I submit Xaraya, a CMS so complicated that trying to create a site as simple as "I just want a page with our contact information on it!" becomes an exercise capable of inducing intra-cranial hemmorage). Additionally, any templating system required grows more and more arcane, until it is essentially indistingushable from the actual programming language in which it's written.For example: the easiest way of getting a Drupal site laid out and usable quickly is to use the PHPTemplate plugin - in other words, to just write PHP code. David Heinemeier Hansson, no stranger to controversy, went a step further than this and labeled general-purpose CMSes "pipe dreams," and said "I believe the time has come to mark a date in the not too distant future for celebrating the death of the general-purpose content management system." (Not like he doesn't have his own thing to push, but that's as may be. See also Jeff Veen's frustration with open source CMSes

3. The social issue: as the content management system grows more and more complicated, they become more and more intractable for the average end user. Responsibility for day to day site updates is pushed to the IT department, which is absolutely not where it belongs. (Once again, I give you the one, the only, Jeffrey Veen.)

There is work in progress to do this in Drupal (which I usually use) but it's not finalized at the moment.
There is a talk about it there : http://drupal.org/node/35036
I too would find this useful.

Other CMS systems may be more advanced in that regard.

I have selected Drupal, myself. I have looked at almost every other CMS out there, and after installing packages, switching languages, and other types of systems-mutilation that some packages require, I've found that Drupal makes my life as a web publisher much easier.

Druapl is also very configurable, even without having to write any code at all. It is all done with PHP, Apache, MySQL, which most GNU/Linux distributions seem to have already on the distribution media. Install your favorite distro, and Drupal fits in quite nicely.

I don't claim to be a web architecture guru, but what's wrong with Drupal? Open source, PHP 5-friendly, and does everything from vanity sites to corporate sites.

no excuse. am i missing a "funny" here? or is a "i have never heard of" posting at best redundant and not 5 points worth at all. btw: i dont mind if you have never heard of "mambo", but dont tell me you have been missing out the best cms!

Instead of developing stuff for the desktop, where you have to chose if it runs on Windows, Mac OS/X or Linux, why not tinker with something web based?

Start with LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) because it is available everywhere on virtually all hosts, or go a little bit further with a framework such as Drupal.

If you are a bit more adventurous and do not care about hosting availability, consider Ruby on Rails.

Joomla is Mambo though...
So, um, as many people hate Mambo with a passion, this might not be the best thing to start with... :)

Maybe Drupal (http://drupal.org/) or one of the many others. You probably have to try to find one that suits your taste anyway (even if it ends up being Mamb^WJoomla).

They are all overkill whatever you do, but such is the nature of the beast.

Err what? Drupal was written by Dries Buytaert and much later, DeanSpace was using Drupal. http://drupal.org/node/769 and for eg. http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/view/252

Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee uses Drupal to run his blog.

I've been using Jeremy's spam module for quite a while now. Great stuff! BTW, here's the main Drupal project page for this module.

The article was about blog software, of which Drupal is an example. Why was my post moderated as being off-topic? FYI, I don't get a kickback from my hosting provider for mentioning their name.

Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.

Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).

Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.

I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.

So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.

First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."

It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.

I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.

Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.

What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.

Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa

I've been thrilled with Drupal, which is open source. It's both easy to use and powerful. You can take a look at my site, which is hosted through 101sitehosting for $29.99/year. I would have had to pay more than that each month to get Slash hosting.

I sorted out putting Adsense on an older version of Drupal for a friends friends news analysis site. A good CMS and the latest version supports adsense easily.

In TFA, however, I didn't notice any mention of adsense or other - read: Amazon - monetizing methods. (read quick, however, so apologies if that's FUD)

Also 'Bad Behavior' clears almost all spam attempts BEFORE it gets a chance to post. Works perfectly and stopped me from moving away from Drupal after spam got out of hand. http://drupal.org/node/30501

OK. So it's a CMS. But it works great as a blog and is OSS. I have recently switched to it on my server, and it seems to handle everything better than Wordpress (I had a lot of spamming problems, and could never get the anti-spam additions to work). With drupal, I have had no problems with it or any of the modules I have installed. drupal.org

Drupal was patched in June and August.

Drupal was patched in June and August.

The only thing I can add is that Drupal CMS is affected by this but they supplied a patch quite a while ago: http://drupal.org/drupal-4.6.3

You realize Drupal is actually what runs The Onion? You can have it up and running smoothly in a day--a week if you're doing substantial skinning or have to write SQL scripts to import previous content (though some are available). If you do go with Drupal and stall out in the forums, feel free to email me with questions.

You're only talking about the appearance.

Slashdot runs on Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/). If you want to, you can change the appearance of it with skins and whatnot. I would also recommend Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/ and Zope (http://www.zope.org/). Hire somebody to create a nice skin for it, and any one of the above systems should be able to neatly handle the backend work.

I thought PHP was already more popular

PHP's popularity is partially due to cost of hosting a PHP web site. PHP is just easier for hosting providers to setup and not as resource-hungry as a JVM. Shared JVM's are also a pain, because often times you really need to restart the whole JVM to get things to work (OutOfMemoryExceptions). So for a serious site, you'd want your own JVM, and that costs even more.

If Java hosting didn't cost 2.5 times as much as PHP hosting (and that's just for shared JVM), we'd probably see more Java-based sites. I know I'd like to have some place to host the Java web apps that I've written for fun. I'm just way too paranoid to host them on my home connection.

As for the languages themselves, I like Java for working on big projects. PHP I use for little hacks and simple web pages (as well as extending Drupal, or whatever blog software I happen to be using). Of course I've never been paid to work with PHP so I don't know the full extent of its capabilities.

Summary contains factual error. SpreadFirefox runs (ran?) on Drupal, not TWiki.

There is http://diarist.com/ - free blog service and
http://drupal.org/ - open source blog/cms tool

I've been using Drupal since a while now. When I need a "community" or "journal" Web site, I use Drupal. (Don't say 'blog', please... Please don't. I hate the word.) A few of my sites are multilingual, hence I use the i18n module available on their site. It does require you to modify a few little things in the initial database and to apply patches on the source code, but it works. Also, after applying the patches, not only can you put links to switch languages, but also the URLs are simple: /en/ for English, /fr/ for French, etc. Plus, Drupal has a good API. That's why I like it so much.

Recently, a project I contribute to moved to OSL as well (Drupal.org).

While free bandwidth is always good, I find that more and more projects being concentrated in a single site is not good.

I think they have Debian there too.

Suppose this place got hit by a volcano or an earthquake, then what?

Anyone knows what disaster recovery plan they have?

Note that their web site is running Drupal, as Gallery is a photo gallery, not a CMS. They didn't write the code their site is running on.

For those interested. Gallery is the next big one in line to move its site to drupal

Drupal + the Project module could also work. :)

Drupal + the Project module could also work. :)

I have yet to see a PHP app -- especially one that also used MySQL -- that used a design pattern other than "Big Ball of Mud" most often.

Have a look to the Drupal code. Great innovative design can be found there.

I am an amature web designer, I am self taught and have been doing more and more commercial work on the side, because people are wanting to use the cheap linux web space out there and need people familiar with software like Drupal.

Recently I have been working a bit with a graphics designer that uses a Mac and Adobe to do her work. She was surprised at some of the stuff I was able to do with open source software and admitted that if the software she used was available on Linux, she would seriously consider switching.

One last thought, with some corprate backing the Mozilla SVG project would probably take the web by storm.

Personally, I'd say go with drupal if you need a really flexible system than can do just about anything. That said, it can be a bit daunting. For a smaller site, I'd go with WordPress (there are rumblings that they'll end up compatible at some point down the road). One nice aspect to WordPress is that the administration console is separate from the site, so it offers a separation of paradigms for users, although they drupal is heading in that direction I believe. There's also an active community of developers behind WordPress, although that can probably be said for most of them.

Drupal is an open source content managment system. Drupal is modular, and very flexible, and you can develop custom themes very simply written in pure php. The reason why I mention drupal, is that theres a few contributed modules that sound like that you are looking for.

Location API provides the framework for location based, and proximty based searching.
EventFinder module uses this API to provide sitewide location based searches and more.
There are also two contributed map modules google maps, and geourl.

It seems like the basic functionatily you are asking for is already developed for drupal, It shouldnt take alot of work to throw these together to do what you want to do.

Drupal is an open source content managment system. Drupal is modular, and very flexible, and you can develop custom themes very simply written in pure php. The reason why I mention drupal, is that theres a few contributed modules that sound like that you are looking for.

Location API provides the framework for location based, and proximty based searching.
EventFinder module uses this API to provide sitewide location based searches and more.
There are also two contributed map modules google maps, and geourl.

It seems like the basic functionatily you are asking for is already developed for drupal, It shouldnt take alot of work to throw these together to do what you want to do.

Drupal is an open source content managment system. Drupal is modular, and very flexible, and you can develop custom themes very simply written in pure php. The reason why I mention drupal, is that theres a few contributed modules that sound like that you are looking for.

Location API provides the framework for location based, and proximty based searching.
EventFinder module uses this API to provide sitewide location based searches and more.
There are also two contributed map modules google maps, and geourl.

It seems like the basic functionatily you are asking for is already developed for drupal, It shouldnt take alot of work to throw these together to do what you want to do.

Drupal is an open source content managment system. Drupal is modular, and very flexible, and you can develop custom themes very simply written in pure php. The reason why I mention drupal, is that theres a few contributed modules that sound like that you are looking for.

Location API provides the framework for location based, and proximty based searching.
EventFinder module uses this API to provide sitewide location based searches and more.
There are also two contributed map modules google maps, and geourl.

It seems like the basic functionatily you are asking for is already developed for drupal, It shouldnt take alot of work to throw these together to do what you want to do.

Drupal is an open source content managment system. Drupal is modular, and very flexible, and you can develop custom themes very simply written in pure php. The reason why I mention drupal, is that theres a few contributed modules that sound like that you are looking for.

Location API provides the framework for location based, and proximty based searching.
EventFinder module uses this API to provide sitewide location based searches and more.
There are also two contributed map modules google maps, and geourl.

It seems like the basic functionatily you are asking for is already developed for drupal, It shouldnt take alot of work to throw these together to do what you want to do.

Drupal is an open source content managment system. Drupal is modular, and very flexible, and you can develop custom themes very simply written in pure php. The reason why I mention drupal, is that theres a few contributed modules that sound like that you are looking for.

Location API provides the framework for location based, and proximty based searching.
EventFinder module uses this API to provide sitewide location based searches and more.
There are also two contributed map modules google maps, and geourl.

It seems like the basic functionatily you are asking for is already developed for drupal, It shouldnt take alot of work to throw these together to do what you want to do.

There's a Drupal module for wiki functionality here: http://drupal.org/project/wiki

Down with Druplicon!

http://drupal.org/node/9068

I'm sorry but when it is suggested by a team of individuals that work *very* close to a project tell me, "Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is highly recommend." (emphasis their's), I do it.

Still, even if they had taken time to "test" the patch as you claim they should, then they had 10 days to do so which should have been plenty of time.