Drupal

Nominations are now open for the 2008 Open Source CMS Award. This is the third year that Packt are running the awards.

You can nominate your favorite open source CMS in four categories:

• Overall Winner
• Most Promising Open Source CMS
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Best Other Open Source CMS

The top 5 CMS's with the most nominations will go through to the final round.

REM is using Drupal for its tour website. Drupal is gaining a lot of traction with a lot of high profile websites switching to Drupal recently. I am particularly excited about REM's use of Drupal because I am a huge REM fan (and obviously a huge Drupal fan)!

The site is a mashup which will display You Tube video's, Flickr Photos and Tweets from members who are going to the concerts for the current world tour. It is a great example of a mashup.

Check out the REM tour website.

How to configure a Drupal multisite setup

One of the core features of Drupal is the ability to run a multisite setup. That means that you can run multiple websites from the same code base. The advantage is that is makes upgrading the core and contributed modules a lot easier and faster, as you just have to upgrade once, rather than multiple times.

I was always of the opinion that when people who use Wordpress discover Drupal, they eventually switch to Drupal. This is because I feel that Drupal is far more powerful and flexible than Wordpress.

However, I have noticed that a small trends seems to be beginning with people switching from Drupal to Wordpress.

Upgrading to a new version of Drupal puts the fear of god into a lot of people. However, it does not need to be scary or time consuming. Because Drupal is highly modular, upgrading is a fairly painless exercise. Furthermore, it is necessary to maintain the latest version of your Drupal branch to ensure that you have the latest security patches.

Drupal 6 has finally been unleashed on the world after a year of development and testing. This is thanks to the hundreds of core developers that made this happen.

So what has changed from the Drupal 5 series?

Using the Pathauto module is a quick and easy way of automatically creating meaningful URL's. Instead of having to type in a URL path manually for each node (page, story etc) yourself, it will do it automatically based on set criteria, like the category it belongs to and the title.

But it does become troublesome when you decide that you want to change your URL path's for what ever reason. Here is a simple way to do change the URL paths in bulk:

One of the annoying things about changing the number of characters for teasers in Drupal is that you have to edit and save every single node (page, story etc) for the change to take effect. Thats ok if you only have 10 pages, but what if you have 1000 or even 10,000 pages? Nightmere times.

Well, it doesn't have to be that difficult, because here is a nice little script that will update all of the teasers at once.

The first step is to change the teaser length in admin -> content ->node settings -> length of trimmed posts.

The EContent magazine has named Drupal as one of the companies/projects that matter the most to the digital content industry. Drupal joins a range of other companies/projects on the 2007 EContent 100 List. Other companies/projects on the list include: Dig, Wordpress, LinkedIn, SixApart, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Plone and Wikia.

Drupal is the overall winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, edging out Joomla and CMS Made Simple, who came 2nd and 3rd respectively.

The Open Source CMS Award is run my Packt Publishing and is selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. There were over 18,000 votes.

Well done to everyone involved in the Drupal project.