It has been an extremely long time since I’ve done any type of comparision between Drupal and Joomla!. While I like to keep a close eye on both of these open source content management systems…I just haven’t felt the need to compare the two applications with each other. The rhythm of each of the two CMS are so different that I honestly don’t know what I would write in the Drupal vs Joomla post. Comparing Drupal and Joomla with each other is like comparing Country music and Jazz with each genre not really capable of diminishing the importance of the other.

This isn’t to say such comparisons can’t be interesting and useful. I definitely know how popular Drupal vs. Joomla! articles can be and the number of visitors such articles will bring to a site.  If you’re interested in reading a new Drupal vs Joomla article, you can find such an article at Achieve Internet.

Some of the comparisons are out of date or lack sufficient technical detail to fully support their conclusions. Furthermore, both Joomla! and the Drupal CMS are on the verge of releasing new versions, Joomla! 1.6 and Drupal 7, that will move both products in a positive direction.

This series of articles attempts to address where the technologies stand now, with a keen eye on the fact that both are moving targets as they approach new releases. The focus will be on using the web design software to build enterprise level websites, including those for large businesses, government agencies, and sizable non-profits, as this is the focus of Achieve Internet, based in San Diego, CA. We will examine the following topics from a technical perspective: baseline content management system (CMS) functionality, back-end appearance and functionality, and coding & customization.

If you’re interested in hearing more from Achieve Internet, the article you’ll want to read is Joomla! vs. Drupal for enterprise web development, Part 1.

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How do you define sites in Dreamweaver for creating and Drupal theme with Themegine? Dreamweaver is a rich HTML and CSS editor. By and far this software has been in the front position among web authoring softwares. In it’s latest versions CS4 and CS5 Adobe introduced new features that makes CMS themes. Key features like Related file, Live view, CSS inspect and CSS enable/disable are true time savers a cool experience for CMS theme developers.

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Some of the most enjoyable Drupal moments for me was the time I spent in 2009  testing Acquia’s Search for Drupal. Acquia Search is a plug-and-play service within the Acquia Network, built on Apache Solr and available for any Drupal 6 site.

I think Acquia Search is probably one of the most significant services provided on the Acquia Network and the feature that will continue to attract businesses to not only Acquia but also Drupal. So although I’m no longer on the Acquia network, I’m pleased to hear that new features have been added to this Apache Solr implementation.

Some of the more significant features being added to Acquia Search include:

• Attachment Indexing – Utilizing the Apache Solr Attachment module you can now search the text in document files such as PDF and Word documents. This is big! Even cooler, those documents can searched locally or remotely.
• Multi-site Searches – Search multiple Drupal sites at once.
• Update to Solr 1.4.1 which fixes a number of bugs.
• Wildcard Searches

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Last week was a very frustrating time for me. For whatever reason, an unusually number of botnets decided to zero in on my Drupal site and created what I call an unintentional  Denial of Service attack (DOS). The attack was actually from spambots looking looking for script vulnerabilities found mainly in older versions of e107 and WordPress. Since the target of these spambots were non-Drupal pages, my Drupal site responded by delivering an unusually large number of “page not found” and “access denied” error pages. Eventually, these requests from a multitude of IPs were too many for my server to handle and for all intents and purposes the botnet attack caused a distributed denial of service that prevented me and my users from accessing the site.

These type of attacks on Drupal sites are nothing new and have been observed and discussed at great length at Drupal.org. However, my search at Drupal.org as well as Google didn’t really find a solution that completely addressed my problem. Trying to prevent a DDoS attack isn’t easy to begin with and at first the answers alluded me.

I originally looked at Drupal for the solution to my problems. While I’ve used Mollom for months, Mollom is designed to fight off comment spam while the bots attacking my sight were looking for script vulnerabilities that didn’t exist. So with Mollom being the wrong tool to fight off this kind of attack, I decided to take a look at the Drupal contributed model Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots then blocks such access and logs their attempts. I actually installed an “unofficial” version of the Bad Behavior module which packages the Bad Behavior 2.1 scripts and utilizes services from Project Honey Pot.

As I had already suspected, looking for Drupal to solve this botnet attack wasn’t the answer. Pretty much all Bad Behavior did for me was to take the time Drupal was spending delivering “page not found” error pages and use it to deliver “access denied” error pages. My Drupal site is likely safer with the Bad Behavior module installed, but it was the wrong tool to help me reduce the botnets from overtaxing Drupal running on my server. Ideally, you would like to prevent the attacks ever reaching your server by taking a look at such things as the firewall, router, and switches. However, since I didn’t have access to the hardware, I decided it was time to look at my Apache configuration.

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Confident Technologies, Inc. today announced that its image-based verification solution, Confident CAPTCHA is now available as a Wordpress plugin, a Joomla extension and a Drupal module.

Confident CAPTCHA™ is a unique, image-based CAPTCHA solution that stops spam and bots in a way that is easy and intuitive for your website visitors. Rather than forcing people to decipher warped and distorted characters or words, Confident CAPTCHA presents the visitor with a grid of randomly-generated pictures and simply asks them to click on specific pictures to verify that they are human and not a bot.

Text-based CAPTCHAs have become so difficult to read that visitors become frustrated and abandon the action or the website completely. Confident CAPTCHA is easy on people while being tough on bots. It improves the user experience, helping increase conversion rates and user interactions on your site.

Use Confident CAPTCHA to stop spam and bots on Web forms, comment posts, new account registrations, polls and surveys, and many other areas of your website.

Confident CAPTCHA is very configurable. You can choose:

• The number of images to display
• The number of images that the visitor must click
• Order of category selection
• Background color
• Optional audio verification for the visually impaired

For more information, please visit www.ConfidentTechnologies.com.

Follow Confident Technologies on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ConfidentTech

As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don’t talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal’s developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.

I’m probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs.  I’m hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).

With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:

• Improvements of session cookie handling
• Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
• Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
• Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
• Improved Japanese support in search module
• Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• Improved logging for login failures
• An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16’s new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved

The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you’re new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.

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Like most source communities, Drupal has been struggling with their marketing, at least in terms of reaching beyond developers. During a recent exercise to come up with a new slogan, Dries Buytert, the creator of Drupal suggested:

come for the software, stay for the community

This seemed to resonate well with the energetic and developer-friendly Drupal community. To me though, it raised a few questions:

1. Is this really how you should select Drupal, or for that matter any other content management system?
2. Is the Drupal community really that good?

During the past years I’ve been arguing that you should not only look at the software when you select a new CMS. You should look features and also consider aspects such as documentation, roadmap, partners, support and yes, community. Real Story Group, the vendor-neutral analyst firm formerly known as CMS Watch, calls this “intangibles” and has increasingly emphasised this in their product evaluations over the years.

Moreover, I recently argued that developers and not software features, were the real key to success. This lead to a session at our Philadelphia conference earlier this month, where we asked whether the community is really more important than the CMS. In my view, the community is very important and something you should consider before you select any product.

So, does the new Drupal slogan indicate that the software is the best part of the project? Perhaps. But do look beyond the software before you select any CMS. As an example, Drupal has fewer experienced implementation partners than most comparable content management systems.

I would say that Drupal has a very dedicated and large community, mostly populated by developers. The community is especially strong within the media industry. The Drupal developers don’t just meet online; they meet regularly face-to-face, including at the bi-annual DrupalCon conferences, where an impressive 3,000+ registered for the San Francisco edition held this past April.

The interesting thing with Drupal, is that the term community has a few different meanings. Drupal is really engineered with community-driven content in mind, e.g. as known from many news sites, where readers can comment on articles and web managers can build their own little villages.

With community playing a significant role in all-things-Drupal, I’ll suggest a perhaps more fitting slogan:

come for the community, stay for the community

In other words, don’t select Drupal just because you have requirements for community-driven content and Drupal is a good fit: Select Drupal only if you have also talked to the community and have a plan for how to engage with it.

Guidelight Business Solutions, a custom software and web strategy company based in Texas, has put together a little video highlighting their experience at last month’s DrupalCon in San Francisco. The video does a good job in capturing the fun, scale, and pace of a Drupal conference. At the start of the video, you’ll also see a snip of video of me taken during an interview while we were waiting for one of the keynote speakers to come on stage. I’m honored to be included in a video among so many of the other talented faces that were there for DrupalCon.

You can check out the video either below or at the website of Guidelight Business Solutions.

Just started reading Drupal’s Dries Buytaert’s blog posting tiled, Joomla vs Drupal: business models and commercial ecosystem. The article comes just a week after he attended CMS Expo and are some of his thoughts on the Drupal/Joomla! comparisons many of us do with open source CMS.

But what does the future hold? The Drupal community seems to be expanding into the enterprise, whereas the Joomla community is expanding into, well … Drupal. All the Joomla companies that I talked to at CMSExpo were in the process of taking their products and services to the Drupal market and rebranding their organizations to be cross-CMS compatible.

When time allows, I may add my own thoughts about Dries’ article in this post as well as a comment over at Buytaert.net. In the meantime, please be sure to read the comments in the article (no flame war so far, yea!) as there is a lot of substance in the comment section too.

While there are several options for Multilingual management of Drupal installations, selecting the “right” method requires a keen understanding of Drupal limitations and benefits.  

Los Angeles, CA – In this free white paper, Drupal Multilingual Website, Oshyn evaluates and recommends several methods of using Drupal Open Source CMS to manage multilingual websites. Oshyn has integrated many commercial and Open Source CMS/WCM solutions within large enterprise environments and has helped clients select CMS/WCM solutions based on the specific requirements of each client such as: understanding the capabilities required for content re-use, integration, personalization, ecommerce, workflows, online marketing, multilingual content, multi-device content, affiliate content sharing and future development plans.

Authored by Oshyn’s Cesar Salazar, this free white paper draws from Oshyn’s extensive experience in Content Management Systems development and integration. Specifically this Drupal Open Source CMS white paper explores: 

•  Management of Websites with multiple languages
•  Management of a Website with one language different than the default English
•  Management of multiple languages in one website
•  Combining management of multiple websites and multiple languages
•  Managing different languages with different databases
•  Managing different languages with one database

The “Drupal Multilingual Website” white paper can be downloaded for free at:http://www.oshyn.com/landingpages/drupal-multilingual

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