Content Management

A couple days ago I opened my Thunderbird e-mail client on my Windows XP system and found an e-mail from Joe Audette of the mojoPortal project. "Mojo whata?", I asked. I thought I knew most of the content management projects (CMS) projects around, but this one didn't ring a bell. After reading his e-mail, I understood I likely have not heard much about his project because my focus on CMS has been a little too narrow lately.

In his e-mail, Audette writes, "Hi, just wondering if you only cover CMS's using php technology or if you would consider giving any press to .NET/Mono based projects? Any coverage of my project mojoPortal would be much appreciated."

As I've mentioned in past posts, I have a strong desire to cover more than just PHP Web applications. mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. Already the talk of a CMS using a blend of Microsoft and open source tools was peaking my interest.

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.

So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.

So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.

Something old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.

The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.

So Earl Miles, tell us what you really think about Drupal's administrative menus:

Drupal’s actual administrative pages suck ass. It’s not just the organization that’s wrong, as I had actually thought going into this. Unfortunately, no, it’s worse than that. While there are some pages that are (by dint of their brevity) relatively good, there are other pages that are nearly unworkable. block administration, menu administration, module administration, access control administration are all headache-inducing pages.

The Google Adsense module for Drupal has been updated by 2bits. Since we use it here at CMS Report, we thought we would also talk about it here. Some of the new features include:

The local newspaper for Sioux Falls, SD contains an article about an online service called Feed Rinse. The service "can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more." According to the article, the service is making national headlines on their Feed Rinse product. I've never used the service, so I can't really give it thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some excerpts from the Argus Leader:

Markus sent us a comment that he has a new version of the Akismet module for Drupal 4.7. Since I have yet to put up a "latest comments" block on my site, I've reposted his comments here:

Hi! Just wanted to mention that I have just released version 1.1.0 of the Akismet module for Drupal 4.7. It's been just 8 days from 1.0.0, but it was then when I realized that the moderator queue had to be improved to allow operations against multiple items. It also includes an experimental set of options to prevent DoS situations caused by certain spambots. That's it, happy blogging!

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We've been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet's filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:

I have to admit something. Before today I had never visited Nick Lewis' blog. However, I'm extremely impressed with the how-to content on his site. I'm sort of known to be theme development "challenged", so I look forward to articles such as the one I'm reading now.

The following is an excerpt of his latest article with regards to theming in Drupal using the PHPtemplate engine: