Drupal News

MicrosoftWatch hosts the following article written by Mary Jo Foley:

With Google buying Blogger creator Pyra Labs over the weekend, many are wondering when and if Microsoft will take a similar plunge into the Weblog-tools world.

It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five "the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit" is a blog builder.

"You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog," confirms Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi.

The Community Starter Kit consists of application code, templates, documentation and forum-based help. According to Microsoft's own definition of the kit: "The Community Starter Kit enables you to quickly create a community Web site such as a user group site, a developer resource site, or a news site." [ read more ]

Food for thought and discussion. What would happen when every MSN/Hotmail user was automatically given the option to opt in for a free weblog (a la LiveJournal)?

Here is an extreme scenario. Having single sign-on in place (.NET Passport), every MSN user could comment on anyone else's blog and have his personal preferences follow him or her as he/she travels from weblog to weblog; a problem the rest of the weblog world has yet to solve. Naturally, their weblogs would seemingly integrate with their IM service/client, and both Internet Explorer and Outlook would get a handy "blog this" feature. Moreover, having billions of MSN users, they could establish de facto technology standards and render existing technologies such as the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API and Trackback almost useless. At every aspect, they would have an immediate technical advantage over established weblog software.

Can anyone give some really good reasons NOT to use Drupal as the sturcture for my school district's Intranet?

Also, does anyone know where else I can post this question to get good feedback?

Gallery 1.3.3 has now been ported to Drupal and released as a module. This integrates into the Drupal user permissions system, and offers simple user-management for creation/addition/admin of galleries and photos. You can bulk-upload photos using zip files, view slideshows (with nifty cross-fade transition effects in Internet Explorer) and take advantage of many of the other cool features of Gallery.

It's working with the current Drupal release (version 4.1.0), and you can grab it from the downloads page.

Nearly everything works, but there are certain minor limitations due to the way Drupal and Gallery are implemented. Please see the README for details and for more information.

I just wanted to begin with a short thank-you for the work that's already been done on this impressive CMS. I've been working with *phpNuke for a little more than a year, however even with the eventual release of 6.5, I find there's still a lot I wish Nuke could do that can't be done without substantial modification. I've been pouring over the package and it's add-ons the last couple of days and learning to use them and I'm impressed by the flexibility and overall organization, not to mention a level of minimalism that's quite refreshing after a year of playing with Nuke and it's descendants.

*Shrug* Even if I find some glaring issue that completely prevents me from putting the package into production on my site, it's worth saying that I still would have had a great time just tinkering with the software and learning to use it (and I don't really see any glaring issues lurking around the corner). This is the coolest re-thinking of the "dynamic content management system" I've come across since I first got Nuke to work, so many months ago.

And credit where it's due: I still like Nuke a great deal and wouldn't hesitate to use it again under different circumstances. It just seems to be headed in a direction that's leaving me behind these days. ;(

Drupal 4.1.0 is now available.

This release adds support for user profiles, comment moderation, improved forums, an auto-throttle congestion control mechanism, improved statistics tracking, paging, various performance improvements, and much more.

The source code is available at:

http://www.drupal.org/drupal/drupal-4.1.0.tgz

For bug reports or future features use the project page:

http://www.drupal.org/module.php?mod=project

For support try the forums or the mailing lists:

http://www.drupal.org/module.php?mod=forum&tid=1
http://www.drupal.org/node.php?id=322

Drupal documentation:

http://www.drupal.org/node.php?id=253

There's a new version of the import module available for testing. In this implementation both feeds and items are nodes. It is able to read RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 and has support for some DC items, the SY module and the content:encoded stuff. In addition to that it also makes use of RSS 2.0's guid and comments elemens (and some more). Adding a feed is as simple as supplying the url and all the other options will be filled in automagically. There's also an option to promote news items automatically .

It needs (lots of) testing and bugs fixed, while some features still need to be implemented. I need some help of taxonomy specialists to find a way to set taxonomy terms on items automatically. When a feed is administered you should be able to specify a set of taxonomy terms for the items.

If you want to test it out on your own installation read the INSTALL file carefully, as there are some important changes when using the cron.php script. You can see it in action on my test site.

Hope you like it. Please send feature suggestions, bug fixes, comments, questions etc. to me.