Jeff WhatCott, Acquia, asked some important and thought provoking questions on his blog, "A Dormant Drupal Opportunity". While the post focuses on Drupal, I think the contents of his post can apply to almost any content management system (CMS) out there.
In the article, Jeff asks whether defining Drupal as a CMS does more harm than good in describing the scope of features Drupal has to offer. In his words, the term CMS is a "20th century term that completely undersells what Drupal is capable of" as social software and a means for collaboration. Considering I really didn't understand what a CMS was until the 21st century, I beg to differ that the term CMS is as ancient as he makes it sound. However, he is entirely correct...many of today's Web applications that we call a CMS, really are not just a CMS.
Jeff asks three questions in his post:
Do you think we should put the CMS term to bed?
Would it be possible to grab some of that team collaboration social software market opportunity for the Drupal community?
Why isn’t there already a billion dollar Drupal services ecosystem for team collaboration? What’s missing?
While I appreciate comments here, please be sure to go over to Jeff's post and respond there too. In fact, if you only want to comment at one site...go there so we don't steal any of Jeff's "thunder". I've already made my comments at his site and I've attached my response to the above questions below.
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.
A couple months ago, I experienced a number of errors at my Drupal site that all pointed to a corrupted database. I believe the problem likely was the caused by a sloppy export/import I performed with the MySQL database while moving the site to a new server.
While my particular database problem was an easy fix, if you really don't know much about databases you may find that you really need some guidance on how to solve problems like these. This article is the process I went through to correct this particular MySQL database problem in Drupal 5 and some general database rules that show why this problem occurred in the first place.
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 knew the publisher liked my first impressions of the book that I included in a post a couple months ago. However, I had no idea I would be quoted in a second print of the Pro Drupal Development nor what would be quoted. Since I obviously bought the book before I had anything worthy to say about the book, my copy of the book does not have a quote by me.
During the past couple years I have recommended to people that they host their Drupal sites on a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a shared hosting plan. While a large number of people do not have problems running Drupal under shared hosting plans, I have always felt that there are less headaches with using a VPS to host your sites. For example, with a VPS I don't have to worry whether the shared hosting plan gives me the necessary MySQL privileges needed by Drupal (especially CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES). From time to time, you also hear from people with "Drupal friendly" shared hosting plans eventually find that their hosting company isn't so friendly toward their Drupal site. Planet Drupal contributor, Clancy Ratliff, is one of the most recent examples for having a host provider not really happy she is using Drupal. So I often ask myself, is shared hosting for Drupal really worth the trouble?
I don't know if shared hosting is worth the trouble but a chain of events have brought me to giving shared hosting another chance for my Drupal sites. Last month, I pushed my VPS so close to the bleeding edge that it became unstable. While I was able to get my sites back online, the downtime clearly told me it was time to move my sites to a new server. While most visitors observed a performance improvement for my Drupal sites since the server migration, it's only now that I'm letting the cat out of the bag. For the past week, CMSReport.com has been under a shared hosting plan and not a VPS. I'm currently running my site using a budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy.
I don't know how long I'll keep my site on a shared hosting plan but I am currently enjoying a break from the work, worry, and experimentation that comes with administration of a VPS. While I may go back to a VPS, I thought it would benefit some newbies and other Drupal users my experiences and thoughts on migrating my sites from a VPS back to a shared hosting plan.
What seems like a very long time since I first heard about and ordered the new Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development, it finally arrived at my doorstep. So far, I have only read Chapter 1, "How Drupal Works", and glanced at the remaining pages of the book but I'm very impressed. The book is written in a very easy, well organized, and informative writing style.
Dries Buytaert had mentioned that when the Drupal developers came together at the Open Source CMS Summit he hoped they could make a video using Jeff Robbin's catchy Drupal Song. I'm not sure the status of that video by the developers, but as a fan of Drupal I decided to beat them to the punch.
My son and I have become addicted to The Drupal Song. In fact, when the song is playing in my house we quickly become The Drupal Boys.
I received an interesting e-mail the other day through the contact form at my site regarding the social bookmarking "features" I have for my posts. The questions asked to me are quite common among new users of any Web content management system. While the questions in this particular e-mail I received would be more appropriate to be asked and answered in the forums at Drupal.org, there were some things in the message I felt the need to address though my blog.
On a recent visit to Drupal's forum I found another post with both Joomla and Drupal in the subject line. Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there. The forum post written by Steve Burge contains a link that takes you to a comparison table he did between Joomla and Drupal.
I received an interesting e-mail the other day through the contact form at my site regarding the social bookmarking "features" I have for my posts. The questions asked to me are quite common among new users of any Web content management system. While the questions in this particular e-mail I received would be more appropriate to be asked and answered in the