Deeds

As most Drupal users already know by now, Drupal 6 is currently at a Release Candidate 3 stage of development. For the Drupal community, this is a time when the developers are wanting people to test, report, and help fix any bugs found in these development version of the Drupal software. At this stage of development, Drupal.org still does not recommend Drupal 6 to be ran on the production server.

As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

Last weekend, both Linux Today and Linux.com provided links and excerpts to an article I posted here at CMS Report.  You can see some of the stats on my newly quantified site at quantcast.com.

Simple PHP Blog 0.5.0.1, a maintenance release, went public on Tuesday of this week.  I know I don't talk too much about it here, but I still like to keep at least one eye open on this particular blogging application.  For you see, I consider Simple PHP Blog my very first Web content management system (WCMS).

Now that Summer 2007 is finally here, it is time to step back for a couple weeks and spend less time in front of the computer.  As I mentioned earlier,  I'm going to use some of this time to publish online a professional report I did on IT user support.  This report was submitted a couple years ago as a requirement for a Master of Science in Administrative Studies with an Information Systems track.  You'll get bits and pieces of it in the following weeks and once I'm done, I'll regroup them similar to the research paper I posted earlier this year.

Last week, someone that goes by the name of Anti sent me an e-mail stating that she finally got a copy of the John K. Vandyk's and Matt Westgate's Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development.  To my surprise she also congratulated me for being quoted on the inside front cover.  Having a quote by me included in the book was a welcome surprise.

I just spent the day with my son hiking along the trails of a nearby state park.  My son is only 3 1/2 so some of the the sights, sounds, and smells are still new to him.  Those trails I've walked a hundred times also becomes new to me when I allow myself to see it all through his eyes.  I left the cell phone in the car and the only modern tools we carried were our walking sticks which were found and left in the woods we traveled.  It was a good day for both of us and the experience served as a reminder to me the value of taking a break from IT now and then.

For the rest of this summer I will be turning it down a notch on the number of posts that are placed on the "front page" here at CMSReport.com.  You shouldn't notice a difference in quality, but I suspect some of you may miss the quantity of new posts.  While we do schedule the time for when a post or excerpt is placed on the front page, by choice we do no automation when it comes to the placement of excerpts on the front pages.  In other words, for an article to make the front page...I need to be sitting at the computer and that's not going to happen as often during the summer months.

If you really want to help, create an account today and start contributing your own CMS stories here at this site.  Even suggestions for links to other articles is appreciated.