When the days are less crazy, we’ll write more about a sister site of ours, the CMS Report. The site is still in it’s iniitial stages with content somewhat limited. The site currently provides content through a news aggregator and an occasional original article. The theme also needs some work. For now though, we’ll just say if you have an interest in web content management systems you’ll likely find something that interests you.

The site covers most open source projects including Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, etc. Also covered is the propriety side of CMS. In the near-future, discussion will also include the broader topics of information systems and system adminstration.

CMS Report currently runs on Drupal 4.7. While CMS Report will allow for comments and submission of articles, it is not expected to introduce a forum-type format. If you like forums, we recommend another CMS-focused site we are associated with…the WebCMS Forum.

This is a classic case of constantly learning something new about computers. In fact for those that know more, if you see any mistakes in what I have to say here…feel free to comment and correct me!

A few days ago I mentioned that we optimized the Virtual Private Server that Like that Idea runs on with Zend Optimizer. We didn’t see many improvements, but I think that I made the mistake in assuming what the optimizer did and didn’t do. From my online readings it appears that the Zend Optimizer works best for those applications encoded on a Zend platform (something we do not have). So I went looking elsewhere and found the open source application, eAccelerator.

eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

I installed eAccelerator from the source on the Apache server. Although not as easy as installing the Zend Optimizer, any Web administrator or computer geek worth his or her grain of salt shouldn’t run into any problems installing eAccelerator. Wow, what a difference! Since the install, the server has been running very well and I think everyone should notice the improvements this time around. The VPS contains a variety of Wordpress, Drupal, and SMF sites…and they all are performing well. If I have a need in the future I’ll bring back the Zend Optimizer since eAccelerator is suppose to be compatible with Zend Optimizer.

Why are we seeing eAccelerator perform so much better than the Zend Optimizer? As the product’s name says, Zend Optimizer is an optimizer for your Web Server.? The eAccelerator package on the other hand is not only an optimizer, but also an accelerator, encoder, and caches the dynamic content (like the pages you see here at this site). So we’re not only seeing the CPU work less because of the code being optimized, but we are also seeing less hits to the database on the server because of the caching. In essence, the server is providing pages faster to our readers but having to work less in providing those pages.

Documentation and support for eAccelerator is rather weak, so I can see why those needing more dependable support may want to purchase the Zend products.? However, so far for this little ‘ol VPS from Dakota Hosting is keeping us happy. If we run into problems with eAccelerator or the VPS I’ll let everyone know. Otherwise, this is the last computer geek article for awhile and we return to normal programming. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a book review or product recommendation for the family…one of the original purposes of this site.

We host Like that Idea and WebCMS Forum through Dakota Hosting on one of their Virtual Dedicated Servers (also known as Virtual Private Servers or VPS). Dakota Hosting’s normal hosting plans have always been optimized for php using Zend Optimizer. However with the virtual as well as dedicated servers you manage the servers yourself and have to install the “extras” yourself. By default the self-managed server does not come with an optimizer for PHP. So today we loaded the free Zend Optimizer. Hopefully, visitors to our site will notice some performance improvements. Although we haven’t had problems before…occasionally our articles get some broader online attention than normal and we like to be ready for those busy periods.

Installing Zend Optimizer was probably the easiest thing we’ve done so far on our server. Put it this way, it was a lot easier to install the optimizer than installing Wordpress or Drupal (both of which are not too difficult to install either). If you have a server you manage yourself, you can get the Zend Optimizer at Zend’s Website. We found a good but dated explanation of how the optimizer works in a publication called New Architect.

We would like to hear from our regular readers if they notice any improvements since we installed the optimizer. We’re always looking at different solutions for tweaking the server! Any additional suggestions for improving performance are also welcomed.

We had great intentions to continue to keep everyone up to date on a new site that we’re building using Drupal, a content management system (CMS). The idea was as we were building the site we intended to write down how we did it so others could learn with us. Well if you look at our Drupal blog here at Like that Idea you would see that we have not had too many posts in the blog. Have we given up on the idea? No hardly, we are just so busy with other projects (including the project of raising a family) that we have had to prioritize and put some of our ideas on the back burner.

I have no doubt the new site focusing on content management systems will eventually be up and running, the question is when and not if it will happen. I suspect that once Drupal 4.7 has been released is when we’ll start working on the site.

In the meantime, We would like to recommend a few places that you can go to learn about Drupal and other content management systems. First, if you haven’t visited the handbooks at Drupal.org lately, you should. A lot of changes have been taking place in the user support documentation at Drupal.org and most of it is for the better. If reading isn’t your thing, Drupal users don’t have to wait for the movie to come out since it is now available at Lullabot. Lullabot is providing both audiocasts and videocasts on a number of Drupal topics. The Lullabot video for managing menus and links with Drupal is very well done.

Last but not least, if you have questions about content management systems and how they can help you build a Website; please consider joining in on the discussions at our sister site, the WebCMS Forum. While most people think of a Web content management system as only Web Portals, the forum also considers software that manages blogs, forums, shopping carts, and photo-galleries to also be variations of a CMS. WebCMS Forum is still a new site, but it already has had a promising start with a number of users of different CMS applications coming together to share their ideas and learning from others. I already find myself learning a lot and like to see it when those from Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, e107, SMF, phpBB, Wordpress, osCommerce, and others express their thoughts and ideas on their own favorite CMS. I you don’t mind me saying it, I hope you like that forum!

I recently joined in a discussion on our sister site, WebCMS Forum, that I thought I would repost here. Hopefully it will help those of you with your own Websites to get you thinking about security and patching the software you are using to address any security issues. Discussions on WebCMS Forum focus on content management systems or CMS for short. What is an example of a CMS? Most Websites today build their sites no longer on HTML pages, but use software where the text is stored (and managed) usually within a database found on the Web server. Like that Idea uses Wordpress which may be considered a subset of a CMS.

The rest of this article was written by me and posted on WebCMS Forum but I modified it slightly here so it makes sense here. By the way, feel free to join in on the discussion or any discussion on the forum if it interests you.? In order to post in the forum you’ll need to register, but registration is free.

You know, I have not seen too many people trying to break into any of my sites until recently. Most of my sites are under a shared hosting plan, but one of my more recent sites is under a dedicated IP. You could tell the hackers were scanning the IP addresses and then any possible directory where the XMLRPC could be located. I had the opportunity to see how many different PHP applications they could exploit..the list was longer than opensourcecms.com provides! ;D

I’m pretty good about patching sites with security patches, I’m probably not so good to install patches that only address bugs with no security issues, especially if I haven’t seen any of those bugs myself. Then months later…lo and behold the bug shows up when I least expect it. Of course, some bugs I create on my own. The “bugs” use to show up when I modified PHP code without knowing what it did, but with this whole transition from HTML to XHTML had caused a few annoyances for me. Sometimes you just forget the “old way” doesn’t work so well when mixed with the new.

Someone mentioned Matt’s formmail scripts was there first script to patch. Matt’s Scripts…now that’s a name and a script I haven’t heard in a long time. Amazingly, there was a time that Matt seemed to be the only one to provide open source code online for free. I wonder if he’s ever been recognized by his efforts? Does he still own his site? Anyone know? Many of us wouldn’t have had good Websites in the 1990’s if it wasn’t for his perl scripts. In fact I didn’t even know what Perl was until I ran across his site.

I really am curious to hear what news anyone has about Matt’s Scripts. Feel free to post here or on Web CMS Forum.

One month after Version 2.0 was released, the folks at Wordpress have released version 2.0.1. The latest release fixes over 114 bugs that had been reported with 2.0. A summary of the changes which were posted at the Wordpress site include:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP environments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird environments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

Like that Idea readers may remember that we reported a few days ago about the poor performance problems we were seeing after upgrading the site to Wordpress 2.0. Now with 2.0.1, we are already seeing some improvements in the time it takes for pages to load in the browser. Our fingers are crossed. We now return to normal programming…

Most of you know that I’m an avid Mozilla Thunderbird user. In short, Thunderbird is an alternative e-mail client to Outlook Express. It’s not as good as the full blown version of Outlook that comes with the expensive MS Office Suite…but it sure runs a lot faster and in my opinion is more secure and easier for the whole family to use. Thunderbird 1.5 has now been released and includes some nice features such as better junkmail protection and “inline” spell checking. What are you waiting for? The program is free on Mozilla’s site: http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/

Mozilla, where have you hear that name before? They’re the same people that brought you the free Firefox browser. Firefox is so popular that even Google packages their toolbar with the browser (click Firefox link on the right). Firefox really shows just how outdated the current Internet Explorer has become.