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

[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.

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.

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.

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.