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Drupal Needs a New Home
reardonsteel writes "All of the Drupal websites were offline for about two days because of a server meltdown at the organization's hosting provider. The main Drupal website is back up with a single temporary page and they've announced a fund-raising drive to raise US$3000 for a new server to be hosted at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University's server farm. Drupal is the leading open-source (written in PHP) content management system and is used to power tens of thousands of websites, blogs, community sites, etc." At this point, all they need is an actual server, too: the OSL has agreed to provide rack space, bandwidth, power, backup facilities and support.
So now we'll go ahead and destroy the temporary server too. Good work.
Steal This Sig
In only 12 hours, they have already raised nearly 2000 dollars for the new server, PRIOR to the posting on slashdot. People who care change the world for the BETTER, while those who don't impact it terribly.
If you don't know anything about the software I listed above, just google them!
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
They have a server meltdown, so Slashdot gives them another?
:)
tim, I think you should watch your (real life) Karma...That's not very nice
Certainly could. But I've never heard about the Mamboserver project ( http://www.mamboserver.com/ ) before. But they dont claim to be leading in the CMS business, just among the most powerful *shrug*
What I don't get is why they aren't renting their own dedicated box, so they don't have to own the hardware. You can get a dual Xeon configuration for about $200-300/month and with about 2TB of bandwidth. Of course now they won't have a monthly bill, but every time they need to upgrade the machine or repair it, there are going to be costs.
see a Text Widget
To answer the question, what is Drupal...
Drupal is the open-source CMS behind:
and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.
I offered them a free Dual Xeon 2.8GHz server, 1GB RAM, 1x80GB hard drive with 500GB transfer a month, hosted at Simpli (my hosting company). We host several Drupal sites and I'd be happy to have them on board. I asked for a text link back to Simpli. I haven't heard back from them, so I guess they'd rather beg their users for money than take a free dedicated server. I have to say I'm a bit disappointed, but it's their money and their choice.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
From the single page, it says:
Fundraise status
Start date:
13 hours 5 min ago
Received:
$6468 USD
Target:
$3000 USD
Last updated:
2 min 56 sec ago
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
liqbase
As a minor contributor to the Drupal project, I can tell you it rocks. It's a very well written piece of code. Much more than a CMS, it's a platform on which communities can be launched and mini applications can be written. I believe that Drupal could help revolutionize web site development for inidividuals, small non-profits, and small businesses. It's an extremely flexible and powerful platform. What's more, the main developers of Drupal are pure to the free software philosophy.
When the site comes back up, you should check it out.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Today, CivicSpace is a distribution of Drupal: their core is unforked, and their modules are developed and stored in the main Drupal repository. They contribute patches to the main project as well as work on their own stuff.
It could well have been the recently revealed XML-RPC exploit which Drupal appears to have been vulnerable to.
Debian released an updated Drupal security package today. I'm sure other distributions have also done so, or are about to.
To the naysayers out there, you should know that Drupal got 11 "Summer of Code" developers. Do the folks at Google obviously think very highly of this open source project.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I'd be cautious grouping it with Slash or nuke. Those are previous-generation CMS systems, and are becoming quite dated.
Newer stuff such as Drupal, Mambo (which I personally dislike), Textpattern, and other newer CMS systems have embraced emerging web technologies (Ajax, CSS) and are generally written with extremely clean code and have very simplistic ways of operating (mac-like if you would care to make the analogy)
Slash and nuke are dinosaurs. They may still work fine, but if you're going to make a new site, you'd do yourself a favor to research the newer options. Development on all of the 'old' CMSes has stalled, and little work is being done to improve them.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Or maybe there was some misunderstanding you could clear up?
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Bull. I used to write all of the code for my own website. It probably took me about a week of full-time-equivalent work, and it worked OK, but that's still a far cry from half an hour. Don't give me any of that crap about it being because you're a better programmer, either. I work on kernels and distributed systems for a living, and have done for over a decade. Web programming is something I do as a break from real work because it's so easy by comparison. Nonetheless, all you can get in half an hour is something that sucks. If you want something that's modular and maintainable, that takes more time. If you want something that's database-efficient, that takes more time...and flat-file-based systems are even worse so don't go there. If you want something that's standards-compliant, that takes more time...and your main page generated 130 errors when I ran it through the W3C validator. If you want it not to look like crap (again unlike your site) that takes more time. If you want to have features like markup in comments and comment preview, decent archive management, categories, and search (again unlike...) that takes more time. If you want to do all of those things and have it be secure, that takes more time; not knowing how to implement features securely is a poor excuse for having a low-functionality site. Do all that in under the week it took me, and I'll be impressed. So far, not even close.
My guess, based on your comment, is that you're another victim of the rewrite bug that often afflicts junior programmers. Writing code is not necessarily more efficient than reading other people's, but it is generally more fun so kiddies always want to rewrite everything in sight. What they end up with isn't usually any better, though. Most code that's written as an excuse not to understand something that already existed sucks far worse than what it replaces. That's why most of the people who roll their own website never even have the balls to make the result available for others to see. They know that it's a lot easier to claim superiority than to prove it.
That's the most offensive thing about your post, and why I went out of my way to be offensive right back. Sure, maybe you and I can (with varying degrees of success) write code to do the things that a typical weblog does, but why should we be the only ones to have sites? Why shouldn't high-school students and grandmothers have them too? Sure, most of what they write is crap, but so is most of what geeks write (including here). What purpose is served by having someone who might be able to contribute code in some other domain that you know nothing about have to learn your most treasured skills as the price of entry to the world of website ownership? What if their contribution is something other than code - like scientific knowledge or political insight? Aren't those valuable too? Thinking that everyone should value what you value is beyond elitist, and contrary to the spirit of free enterprise. It's just a crutch for insecurity, not a valid or useful attitude. It's almost as pathetic as posting fake-IQ-test results to your blog.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Well, it turns out, you're right. I went to his site and thought, "hmm, a blog system with comments and trackbacks, maybe he does have a point if he built this whole thing in 30 minutes." But then I tried his system. Anyone can add comments -- comment spam could (and probably eventually will) overrun his system. In addition, I was able to easily drop JavaScript code into the comments and it was executed! Of course, I only dropped in a harmless JavaScript alert, as I don't want to get in trouble for "hacking" a neophyte's crappy blog system.
But in any case, to the grandparent post: my God, man, you cannot build such a shoddy, terrible system, and then tout the benefits of reinventing the wheel. Your wheel is awful, and better people before you have built wheels that put yours to shame. Yours is bad enough to actually be dangerous. It's a black-hat's wet dream. SQL injection, code insertion, you don't even launder your input! I fear for your site and the server that hosts it.