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Drupal 4.6.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the drupal-carey-show dept.

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."

6 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. PHP-Nuke by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    1. Re:PHP-Nuke by styrotech · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. ... plone by dago · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    Compare with Drupal with xxx on CMS Matrix

    --
    #include "coucou.h"
  3. The most well designed PHP app by dolmen.fr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The most well designed PHP app by JonBob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
  4. Re:Not impressed by Synistar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.