• Drupal Pre-Consultations
• Drupal Requirements Analysis
• Drupal Planning and Design
• Drupal Development
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1. Core functionality - Feature overview
2. Contributed modules extend core functionality - Modules

Think inside the box - Contemporary Wisdom.

11 July 2006 and the IBM Internet Technology Group team released its evaluation of various CMS systems.

The team operates a closed community based website and evaluated various open source CMS packages including Drupal, Mambo, Ruby On Rails, Typo3 and some more blog-centric engines such as Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern.

Are you looking for a nice concise tutorial in installing Drupal?

Artem of Finland has provided one with detailed step-by-step instructions and lots of screenshots.

Access it here. 

Today I received an email from a client thanking me for following up on a problem that has arisen after their site was upgraded to Drupal 4.7.

In part the email read:

That's great that you can sort out the paypal problem. There is always an unexpected challenge with change.

This made me reflect. (Not that I don't have more urgent things to do than sit around reflecting.)

Why do people need us Drupal Experts anyway? After-all Drupal is a system designed to make it easier for people to take control of their own website.

Some time ago I read a comment that "Google loves Drupal". It was conveying the fact that Drupal sites seem to get good prominence in Google.

I am proud of how my sites come up in Google. This site has a Drupal page rank of 4/10. At time of writing it comes up on google.com.au in top position for a search on the keyword "Drupal". That has been the case consistently since a week or two after the site went live. Now it is also creeping slowly but surely up the international google.com listings.

A few weeks back I had to go through 5 or 6 pages of the international listings before I found drupal.com.au. Today it is coming up at 6th position on the 2nd page, or 15th overall.

Dries Buytaert has written an article in which he compares various server configurations in regard to Drupal performance. His benchmarks cover APC (Alternative PHP cache) or no APC, PHP4 or PHP5, reverse proxy, mod_php or FastCGI, Apache or LightTPD. He concludes that:

the slowest configuration is Apache 2 running PHP5 as an Apache module without using APC. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common configurations. The fastest configuration using the more secure FastCGI method, on the other hand, is Lighttpd with PHP4 in FastCGI mode using APC. For anonymous visitors, the latter is almost 4 times faster than the former, while being more secure.

I was pleased today to learn that the e-commerce module set has been released for Drupal 4.7.

Naturally many of us have been waiting patiently for this release. We are extremely grateful for the many Drupallers who have put in their own time to get the new version to the release stage. Evidently there are still a few issues to iron out.

I am anticipating utilising the modules soon in one or two projects on my drawing board.

In the future I would like to be more involved on the work that goes on producing such Drupal Enhancements but to date that has not been practicable for me. I am pleased to be able to begin promoting Drupal in Australia and consider that task to be one of the small ways I give something back to the community.