Packt Publishing recently asked me to be a judge for their Open Source Content Management System Award. You can find a brief bio and mug shot of me on their judges page.

For my non-IT friends, content management systems are basically software applications you place on the Internet server that are quickly replacing the old "flat file" format. For example, I use a CMS to blog about CMS as well as this site. Yea, my website needs some work done to it...perhaps when cold weather returns to South Dakota. Despite what you might think from the bio, I'm still with the National Weather Service and currently don't have the time or resources to make my "side business" in information technology anything more than a hobby. If IT positions were ever "downsized" in the NWS, though I know exactly what I would be doing for work.

Recently, I read some good posts regarding content management systems (CMS) on a few blogs I visit almost daily.  The posts have had me thinking and reflecting in general about CMS.  However, I won't talk too much about them so you get a chance to go on and read the articles yourself.  The first post comes from OpenSourceCommunity.org and the second post from Gadgetopia.

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.

This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS.  The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?".  The author writes:

I'm currently in the process of moving CMS Report and some other sites I manage to a new VPS.  The original reason for the change was to move my sites off of a legacy version of Linux (Fedora Core 2).  However, I'm also making the server change because of too much bleeding edge experimentation by yours truly that has brought my server's stability into question.  Believe it or not, a reboot of the server doesn't fix everything!

CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation". The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS).  Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place?  For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.

Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.

In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators.  While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system.  As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.

Mozilla's flagship e-mail client, Thunderbird, is now available under version 2.0. I've been running the Thunderbird 2.0 nightly development versions for almost six months without any problems. I expect Thunderbird users will have little problem with upgrading from version 1.5 to version 2.0. Straight from the release notes I've listed at the bottom of this post are the new features users will find in Thunderbird 2. None of the new features are earth shattering for e-mail clients but I do find comfort that Mozilla can always teach its software new tricks.

One of the new features that is listed for Thunderbird 2 is the use of Nullsoft Scriptable Install System as the new Windows installer. The message reads that the new installer "resolves many long-standing issues". For anyone that might know, I'd be curious as to exactly what the long-standing issues were? Were the issues merely technical or were there some political open source issues involved with the decision? Just curious as I haven't had the time to dig through some of the developer blogs/notes for the advantages of using the Nullsoft installer.