Actually, I used Post2Blog for a half year without problem. Unfortunately, I'm now on Ubuntu. No more windows applications from now on. .Net applications may be compatible to Mono but I don't want to waste my time to try it out. So I have to find a new off-line blog publishing tool for Linux. I found several candidate but none of them officially support Drupal and my blog engine is Drupal.

Drupal is becoming more popular this year. One of noticeable sign is security vulnerability report. During this year, Drupal already officially reported 8 advisories. The last two advisories was announced yesterday via e-mail followed by a post on the web. Fortunately, upgrading to Drupal 4.7.2 is very easy. Just to run a single command as below.

cvs update -d -P -r DRUPAL-4-7

According to announcement, I have upgraded all drupal sites in my control to 4.7.1 with just one command as follow. Fortunately, I checked out Drupal source from the CVS repository directly so I can synchronize so easy.

cvs update

It’s time to upgrade to fix vulnerabilities. In addition, don’t forget to limit access in files directory to prevent intrusion by uploading malicious codes. To do so, please make sure you have .htaccess in files directory with below content.

SetHandler This_is_a_Drupal_security_line_do_not_remove

I have used Drupal for a several months. One problem I found is installation system. Actually, it is not real problem for me but my colleagues. They are not programmers or power-users but instead, they are just end-users. In order to install Drupal, I have to place the Drupal source somewhere, initialize database, configure settings.php and then create the first user account. So the most difficult part is to create new database and populate base schema based on what predefined by Drupal’s core. Comparing to Joomla!, it is much more simpler to simplify installation process by wizard style for going through filling the form. So, Drupal is suitable for power-users who want to take control everything and like deploy complex sites. What is complex site? Drupal, not like other Joomla, is designed to reduce core code modification and patch. In other words, it is designed for easier upgrading without conflicts of modification. Your modifications are usually placed in independent directories so that you can update core code anytime you like.

I have found an unofficial announcement at AGCentral. It pointed me to the new AG portal to host AGDP. Where is it? No, not the new place but it is just a new CMS, Drupal. The new AGDP is now organized as Documentation taxonomy. Wow! It is a big move for AccessGrid.org from handmade website to interactive one. As expectation, it is many more up-to-date.

There are so many criteria to help choosing a CMS. However, I would say that the most important part is impression at the first glance. If you are a developer or designer, you don’t really care about look and feel because you are able to modify it yourself. In fact, you might suppose to modify it to fit your imagination so you choose which is better for modification. Anyway, the situation is totally in most enterprise. One with manager role chooses what he/her want. They usually focus on what they see at first signt. Yes, it’s just look and feel. They don’t care about how good it is.