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.

This looks like a night of upgrades for Like that Idea. Earlier this evening, we upgraded the server with Zend Optimizer. Now we’ve upgraded Wordpress to version 2.0.2 which is mainly a security release though a few other bugs were fixed. During this upgrade we also upgraded the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to version 3.1. The plugin upgrade adds not only tagging suggestions from Tagyu but also Yahoo. Finally, I renabled the Wordpress chaching, but of course once again I’m not seeing that much difference in performance due to the enabled chaching. I wish someone could point me to a good reference to how caching works in Wordpress 2.x.
Are there any negatives to doing all these changes in one night? Well, yes. If there is a significant boost or degradation in performance for this site…I won’t know if it was due to the chaching, Wordpress upgrade, Ultimate Tag Warrior upgrade, or the Zend Optimizer! However, I don’t expect problems to develop (last famous words of an over-confident system administrator).

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.

Part Two in a series of articles on Website Building using Drupal

We’ve decided to use Drupal for our content management system (CMS). An important question for newbies remains, how do we get Drupal onto a real Internet Website? You know we need more than the “free server space” the Internet Service Provider is providing, but where do you start? Believe it or not, these basic questions have been asked by even some of the best people I know in information technology (IT). Many IT people may help run or manage the company Website, but someone else in the company left them in the dark to how the company got their Domain Name in the first place. If you’re a small business, you may have computer people but what you don’t have are thousands of dollars to throw at a Web server. How do people get their site on the Internet at a reasonable price, you ask? It’s time to shine some light on these unanswered questions.

The simple answer is you just need to purchase an Internet name (actually called a Domain Name) and “rent” some space on an Internet Server through a shared hosting plan. So are companies providing theses Web services difficult to find? No, not at all and that is the problem. Typing in “domain name” or “web hosting” on your favorite search engine will give you so many companies to choose from that the task can be too overwhelming. Although we’re interested in finding the right hosting company to run our CMS, Drupal, for any Website this is the minimum I would look for when deciding where to host your Internet Site:

• A shared hosting plan that includes PHP at no extra cost. PHP is a programming language used almost exclusively for the Web. Some companies will charge you extra for PHP, but by today’s standard this is a basic feature. (Drupal requires PHP 4.3.3 or higher).
• A shared hosting plan that includes MySQL. MySQL is an open source database that is commonly utilized by many PHP applications, including Drupal. Once again, some companies will charge you extra for the database, but in my opinion that’s so 1990’s. Look elsewhere if you can’t get a basic plan with MySQL included. (Drupal requires MySQL v3.23.17 or higher, but I recommend no lower than MySQL 4).
• A shared hosting plan that provides a “control panel” to help manage your site. In the “old days”, everything was done by the command line. But these days, a couple clicks of a button will setup the database you need for Drupal or install extra open source applications that you may want to use along with Drupal. Even a command line junkie like me has found these online control panels to be time savers.

Ok, so you found a place to register your domain and host your site using my advice. You’re all set for Drupal, right? Well, Drupal needs a little bit more tender loving care than most CMS I’ve ran across. Namely, Drupal requires the ability for you to LOCK TABLES and eventually with Drupal 4.7, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES. Neither of the before mentioned MySQL database privileges are available by default. Worse, many shared hosting providers don’t give you the option to turn on the needed database privileges to properly host Drupal. In the past, I’ve expressed disappointment with the developers of Drupal for designing a CMS that requires these features. Whether I was fair or not to the developers, one just has to accept that Drupal has database needs that not every shared hosting plan includes. I’ve spent some time removing the code from Drupal that contained LOCK TABLES, but eventually such actions have led me to a dead end (potential problems with database corruption and Drupal requiring more CPU usage).

So if you want to find Drupal a home, make sure your shared hosting plan gives you the already mentioned database privileges. Since I wanted to stay with my current Web hosting provider, Dakota Hosting, I purchased through them a Virtual Private Server (VPS) which is also called a Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). The benefit to a VPS/VDS is that you get virtually full administrative rights to the server. You can also host more than one domain name on the server (I can host up to 30 Websites) offsetting the costs you would pay for a simple shared hosting plan. For me, having access to a VPS has been a very satisfying experience.

If the $30 to $50 per month costs of a VPS is too high for you, then your only option is to make sure your shared hosting plan offers the rights to the database features you need for Drupal. Drupal.org has started up a list of hosting providers that are Drupal friendly. I would also check out the Drupal forum or the forums at WebHostingTalk for more information and additional options.

So now we not only know which CMS we’re going to use for our site, Drupal, but we now have knowledge of how to get an Internet site of our own. Hopefully, you too can find a nice home for Drupal. In the next article, we’ll take a look of how to download Drupal, uncompress the files, and install the software onto the Web Server. In later articles, we will also have to consider how best to configure Drupal, install any needed modules, install themes, and eventually customize Drupal to meet our own needs.