Content Management

Earlier this week, I shared the below article on CMS Report which announced that the site has stopped accepting new articles. which announced that the site has ceased accepting new articles. Passion projects like CMS Report have always been challenging for me to abandon. Moreover, when nostalgia and my desire for continuity are combined, I tend to keep things like this in my life longer than I should. However, after two decades, it’s time to let this site go and redirect my time elsewhere. So for a second and most likely final time, I bid farewell to CMS Report.

I spent this weekend upgrading my "non-personal" websites from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. There are four of them which include socPub, CMS Report, INFOTECH Pub, and After Work Pub. These websites share some of its content from one another using the Domain contributed module. Managing four websites under one database and one Drupal install provides some advantages but also presents some unique challenges. Luckily, the beta version of the Domain module was developed enough to not present too many upgrade obstacles for me.

I have ran this website of mine on Drupal since 2005 starting with Drupal 4.6. This past week I upgraded bryanruby.com from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. This being a Drupal upgrade, I'm happy to report the experience was an average event for me. After installing countless versions of Drupal over the years since then, the upgrades have not always gone well. 

At the risk of dating myself, I’ve been writing and posting articles online since the 1980s. Back then we didn’t have the Internet but we did have dial-up modems and bulletin board systems (BBS) hosted by computer enthusiasts. When the Internet, blogging, and self-hosted websites became popular in the late 1990's and early 2000’s I was also there. For awhile I hosted a website focused on content management systems that in its peak easily received over 100,000 unique visitors a month.

WordPress 5.9 was recently released. As was hinted in the BuddyPress 10.0 article, the most anticipated new feature in this new version of WordPress is full site editing. The Site Editor is a new feature to WordPress that allows block editor users to build their entire site with blocks. Unfortunately, full site editing is only available to content creators that are using a Block theme specifically designed to take advantage of the new feature.

Full Site Editing doesn't stand alone in WordPress as additional features and tools have been added for the site editor to come to life "out of the box" once version 5.9 is installed.

BuddyPress 10.0.0 "La Pino'z" is the first major release of 2022 for the WordPress plugin. BuddyPress is a plugin to build online communities and includes features such as user profiles, groups, activity streams, notifications and can be integrated with the WordPress plugin bbPress to enhance community forums.

Highlights of new features and significant changes in BuddyPress include:

It make take awhile but when I make a mistake I will eventually admit and correct the error of my ways. Half a decade ago, I turned my back on supporting niche websites and focused all my effort in creating a new multi-topic website which you now know as socPub. As counter-intuitive that it sounds, the more diverse and interesting topics we published under this website, our number of loyal visitors to the website decreased in numbers. I found this analysis to be alarming and discouraging.

The third feature release of Drupal 9 recently became available. New features and improvements in Drupal 9.3.0 include:

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

May be having some old articles spit out on the social media feeds. Updating sites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and not 100% sure what I'm doing. So much for being the CMS guru I once was...

After years of maintaining and hosting my own WordPress and Drupal sites myself, last year I decided to give WordPress.com a trial run for one of my websites. I opted to subscribe to WP's Premium plan over their Business plan. The initial quantity of content for my website was low and I could not justify the higher cost of the Business plan for this site.

Overall, my experience with WordPress.com has been pleasing. While it may be cheaper to host and manage your own website (WordPress is available as free open source software), there is definitely less hassle with letting WordPress the service do the heavy lifting for you. I can see a day coming where I host all my WordPress sites on WordPress.com.