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

[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

[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.

... plone

[dago]

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

Compare with Drupal with xxx on CMS Matrix

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.

[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.

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.

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: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.

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...