Drupal Posts | be fused

Drupal has won Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award for 2008. This is the second year in a row that Drupal has won the overall CMS award and is in addition to the Best PHP Based Open Source CMS Award for 2008. It is testament to tremendous progress that Drupal is making as an open source product to be to be reckoned with.

Drupal has one the 2008 Best PHP Based Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing. It beat fellow finalists Joomla and CMS Made Simple, who ere tied for runner up. It seems that Drupal's highly module framework and thriving community are two factors that tipped the award in its favour.

Out of the box Drupal will display a simple Access Denied message is a user is trying to access content that they do not have permission to. This is not exactly user friendly. A better solution is to redirect the user to the login form and when the user logs in, redirect them back to the content that they want to see. There are two main ways to achieve this.

Every now and again the node permissions table on a Drupal site can go out of whack. The result is that some users may get an accessed denied message when trying to access pages.

This is fairly easy to fix on a "normal size" website. You simply go to admin -> content -> post settings and click "Rebuild permissions".

However, this does not always work on a partcularly large Drupal based website. I have tried this on a site with around 11,000 nodes and it times out, giving me a page not found error.

Boost is an amazing Drupal module that can dramatically improve the page speed performance. This can improve the experience of visitors and help a web site cope with unexpected surges in traffic.

The Problem

One of the major problems with Drupal is the number of database queries required to construct each page when a user visits a web site. This is cut down hugely when you enable the built in page caching. But cached page data is still stored in the database, so the site still needs to call the database.

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.