Drupal 4.6.0 Released

ajayg writes "Drupal is IMHO one of the best open sourced Content Management Systems out there. The Drupal community has just released version 4.6.0 of their PHP based CMS which finally provides support for PHP5. The release follows 6 months of development, and includes -- among other changes -- better search function as well as usability improvements for permissions, block configuration, statistics tracking, logs, forum configuration, content administration, etc."

Comments

PHP-Nuke

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

How well does this fair against PHP-Nuke, PHP-BB, invision and other CMSes? Does anyone have any first-hand experience?

Re:PHP-Nuke

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know but I strongly encourage people to use mambo.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[styrotech]

PHP-Nuke and PHP-BB are spaghetti coded nightmares with frequent security holes, and are a total pain to extend/customise.

Drupal has a much cleaner core design with a good API and theme engines. It also has impressive metadata capabilities for organising content. And a friendly vibrant community with no big egos involved, and lots of available 3rd party modules.

The only criticism I can think of would be that out of the box it is more of a blog style community portal than a static site CMS. It can do static site type stuff, but you will need to tweak it a little.

It's also pretty fast - up there with the fastest CMS apps. I'd recommend checking it out.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[bedessen]

Agree 100% about phpbb. Stay the hell away from it. Somebody finds a cross site scripting vuln or remote code execution vuln every other week it seems. Besides, it's not really a CMS at all, it's just a bulletin board, and not a very good one at that. I prefer IPB any day of the week, phpbb's feature set is rather lame. About the only thing going for it is that it's free.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[CDarklock]

Drupal used to have this feature where you could click on things to edit their styles, but they took it out. If they've put it back, Drupal is just too cool for words.

If they haven't, Drupal still has its own built-in forum system. This places it in pretty sparse company, with the only other decent package being Land Down Under, to my knowledge.

Drupal is, as I recall, significantly more secure than LDU. However, where Drupal fails me is in its security *flexibility*; I'm looking for something with very low-level access control, along the lines of "this forum is open to registered members who are male, over the age of 16, and have either purchased an access level of 32 *or* been members for at least six months and uploaded more than two megs of approved files". So far, there's no such thing, so I'm just rolling my own and writing custom SQL queries to support the level of access I want.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[DavidTC]

You can almost do stuff like that with modules in Drupal.

There is, for example, the 'opt-in' module, which, despite the name, just gives roles to people who click a checkbox. (Obviously designed for a mailing list, but they're real roles, and work everwhere.)

And there's paypal subscription, granting roles to people who pay money.

And there's 'automember', where frequent posters can automatically get assigned roles.

The real problem is that node permission suck. You can get node_privacy_byrole, but that's a simple OR of roles able to read and write. There's no way to do boolean expressions.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[VolciMaster]

When did PHPbb become a CMS? Last I saw it was a bulletin board environment.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[CDarklock]

I miss the BBS days when "GMA16(S32|(R1P180))" did the job. The resolution of modern access specifiers is simply ridiculous; it's either so generic as to be effectively useless, or it's so limited as to be *actually* useless.

I should build something to fix that. Telegard ACS codes are probably a bit too terse these days, but I could probably come up with something comparable.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[Anonymous Coward]

taxonomy based permissions or the OC module depending on what your goal is cna be had with the add on modules.

Re:PHP-Nuke

[cheesybagel]

phpbb may be poorly coded and ridden with security holes, but there are loads of themes for it, there are loads of third party extensions for it, loads of support since loads of people use it, and like you said, everything is free.

... plone

[dago]

or to plone ? (which is my favorite opensource CMS)

Compare with Drupal with xxx on CMS Matrix

Re:... plone

[byolinux]

Plone is really really good. I use it on all my sites.

I thought I'd give Drupal a go - installed it, which wasn't particularly friendly, even when compared to PHP apps like Wordpress... it all seems a little like a souped-up blogging tool, instead of a real CMS.

Re:... plone

[dago]

yep, the problem with so-called "CMS" is that many are blog-oriented, which isn't bad in itself, but sometime, you want something more oriented toward knowledge management.

Not impressed

[Elledan]

For a while I've been looking at different CMSs to use with my site, and the one which consistently came to the foreground as the easiest and possibly the best option for a community-driven (i.e. with forums and other means of user activity/feedback) CMS in discussions, is XOOPS.

Just now browsing through the Drupal site, I'm left totally unimpressed by the forums and general features their own site seems to offer, not to mention that the screenshot gallery appears to have some CSS issues with Firefox.

Re:Not impressed

[Synistar]

While it is true that the Xoops community has a lot more web designers working on it, under the hood Drupal has a much nicer design.

Xoops is a good attempt at taking a *Nuke engine and cleaning it up by using object oriented design. But this still leaves some cruft in there.

On the other hand Drupal has a much leaner design. And it can be completely CSS themed now (Xoops still mostly uses layout table designs). Drupal does have a slightly higher learning curve (e.g. the taxonomy system), but it is more flexible in the long run.

I have run both and find that they have different strengths. Xoops is more automated and would be easier for non-programmers. However, Drupal is a much cleaner implementation and is more tweakable.

Drupal was good, now I use e107.

[BrookHarty]

I was heavy into Drupal, until it was hacked. But I suspect it was a php security hole not Drupal. I decided to try e107, and so far I'm really impressed. Also has a good forum built in, and many themes which drupal didnt have.

http://e107.org/

Also, to compare Drupal with other sites and a ranking of popular CMS software, check out http://www.opensourcecms.com. Its good to know what each CMS software offers, and they had a trial section where you could log in as admin and see what the admin section was like. Thats very impressive.

Re:Drupal was good, now I use e107.

[Anonymous Coward]

Drupal does have one open security hole.
http://secunia.com/search/?search=drupal

Re:Drupal was good, now I use e107.

[badfish99]

Well, the "open" one is left over from 2002, and all the subsequent ones have been fixed. Looks to me like they never went back to check whether the old bug was fixed or not.

Re:Drupal was good, now I use e107.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the "open" one is left over from 2002...

So, because it is "left over", it's not important? Hogwash.

Re:Drupal was good, now I use e107.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's becuase that version is so old you should not be using it.

The most well designed PHP app

[dolmen.fr]

I don't know if Drupal is the best Open Source CMS, but at least it is by far the most well designed PHP application I've ever seen. The hook mecanism uses the PHP language symbol table to provide very good extensibility. It doesn't use PHP classes in its structure, but it is a strong point as this article shows: Drupal Programming from an Object-Oriented Perspective.

I hope many open source PHP applications will reuse the Drupal architecture principles.

Re:The most well designed PHP app

[JonBob]

As the author of the article in question, I'd be happy to take some constructive criticism.

Quick summary for the link-wary:

• Drupal doesn't use PHP's classes, for a few reasons such as support for PHP 4 and problems with conditional code inclusion.
• Drupal does have an architecture that reflects many of the underlying principles of OOP.
• Drupal also implements many of the standard Gang of Four design patterns.
• The designers are open to the use of OOP language constructs, so long as they don't require PHP 5 (Debian is still on 4.1!) and they aren't "classes for the sake of classes"; that is, they must provide a benefit that cannot be trivially realized using the current methods.

Nuke's great

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like seeing your site on the defaced/hacked lists.
Drupal is much more stable and secure. If you're running PHP correctly, it's fairly well locked down.
*knock wood*
Haven't had any problems yet.

phpNuke, however, it was like restoring backups every other week.
Just wait. If the Brazilian script kiddies get their hands on your site, you'll know what I mean.

Drupal on Citizen Chris

[m_evanchik]

I've been using drupal on citizenchris.org, which I administer for a friend (blatant plug).

I've been happy with the results. It has a clean design and good documentation for a free software project.

I've been too lazy/busy to tinker much with it, but the leqrning curve should be simple enough for most administrator types, though not necessarily for the layman.

Re:Drupal on Citizen Chris

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

So it's BLOG software? I suppose in "fact" this is a CMS, but hardly what most pros think of when you say "CMS". Why not call it WHAT IT IS, blogware?

Require PHP5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this require PHP5 or can I continue using it on PHP4?

Re:Require PHP5?

[JonBob]

Nope. It supports 5 as of this release, but the requirement is 4.3 (can run on 4.1 with some features disabled).

Re:Require PHP5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drupal requirements

http://drupal.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

Drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform.

Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

Re:http://drupal.org/

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

In other words, blogware.

Re:http://drupal.org/

[killes]

Drupal can also drive your average brochure site or be used as a knowledge base app for your intranet. There are hardly any limits. Due to its extensiblity you can add a lot of features (or omit them). You should not base your assumptions about what Drupal can do based on what you see at drupal.org. BTW, there aren't any blogs there...

Re:http://drupal.org/

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the fucking website, you tit. It's not blogware. You obviously have diffcultiy understanding the concept of what a CMS can do.

Tested under a "slashdotting" my ass

[web_boyo_in_sac]

quoted from their features

"Caching - The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server's load. Not only can the caching be tuned in real time, while your site is under load, but it has been successfully tested under a "slashdotting" and performed extremely well."

but when I went earlier, during the relatively MILD /. effect the developers section causes, sure enough there was a "mysql too many connections" message on the screen.

Re:Tested under a "slashdotting" my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

>sure enough there was a "mysql too many connections" message on the screen.

Do you know how to interpret error messages? Did that message indicate any problems with Drupal? Or did it only report that the mysql connection limit was reached?
How is that a problem with Drupal?

You sir are a certified idiot.

Re:Tested under a "slashdotting" my ass

[Metaphorically]

Okay, I'll take the bait. Maybe I'll be sorry.

The statement from Drupal indicates that they reduce server load by not requiring so much database access for cached pages. Perhaps even no database access at all.

Although the MySQL error is not guaranteed to be due to Drupal database access, that would be my first suspicion if I were debugging it. After all, it should be Drupal that's actually emitting the message, right?

And yes, I do know how to interpret error messages: read them track down the source that emitted them, and figure out what's really going on.

Fwiw, I think the page caching scheme is a great idea and it's simple enough to do in PHP that I'm working on doing it on my own pages.

Very Clean

[idonotexist]

As someone who has done lots of PHP programming, this is succinct.

The taxonomy ('vocabulary') looks interesting for an app like this. Think I'll play and see how many children I can have. :)

How to download the Drupol Handbook ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It displays fine in Operav v 7.54u2
but we can't save the page, or even
display the pages HTML's source...

What's up here? :-(

Also, how come there are all these
-tiny- modules... ie, instead of one
nice, easy to download "in one lump"
tgz and/or zip file with source,
documentation, etc.

How open is Drupol intended to be?

Has anybody got its web site (with
all files) rolled up in a gzipped
tar ball...yet ...please?

TIA