John Galvin of io1 describes the process his company went through in transitioning from their own XML/XSL content management development to Drupal. After looking at Joomla! and other PHP-based CMS solutions, they settled on Drupal in large part because if its strength with handling taxonomies.

If you or your company have been considering implementing a content management system, John's post is worth a quick read.

Drupal and Wordpress were among the winners in C|NET's Webware 100 awards for 2008, announced on Monday by Webware.com editor Rafe Needleman. 300 web applications and interactive sites were chosen as finalists by Webware.com editors, and the winners were voted on by the web users who actually use them. Over 1.9 million votes were counted (and no campaign chairmen were defense contractor or telecom industry lobbyists, either!).

In the Publishing category, WordPress and Drupal shared the Top 10 award with Apple's .Mac service, Blogger, flickr, fotoflexer, photobucket, Picasa, twitter and Worth 1000.

Congratulations to the Drupal and WordPress communities for this recognition of their hard work on two outstanding social publishing products!

I got an email from someone inquiring about my availability for a project yesterday. Another person asked me through New Tech Heroes' contact form about a job possibility last week. Both asked the same question: "Are you available for long-term work?" They enjoyed the blog, and got the idea that I have some idea what I'm talking about and can use the technologies involved (which is one of the reasons that anyone involved in new media should have a blog). They weren't sure, however, if I was actually available for work.

Let me clear this question up.

Yes, I am.

This is a fast-moving time in a fast-moving industry. Startups are launched and shut down in a matter of months. Anyone working in new media or social publishing should be open to new opportunities, and I certainly am. While I have a small list of ongoing clients' projects, I'm also living in Michigan, which a quick peek at the statistics will tell you isn't exactly a hotbed of economic growth in 2008.

So, yes, I am open to opportunities. Full-time or contract jobs, projects, you name it. If it's related to writing or web development, particularly using open source tools like Drupal or Joomla, please consider me if you like what you see here on New Tech Heroes. I have a wide range of media and communications experience, and I'm willing to relocate or travel as needed. My resume is available here.

Image source: Steve Woods (woodsy on sxc.hu), Colchester, Essex, U.K.

Drupal version 6.2 was released today, fixing a number of bugs and some important security issues. The security flaw is considered to be "moderately critical," and is described on the Drupal website as follows:

The menu system routes page requests to appropriate handlers. It also determines whether a user has access to pages based on several criteria, such as permissions assigned to a role. Drupal 6 features an entirely revised menu system, including changes to the way access is dealt with, which if not properly understood by developers can lead to vulnerabilities. This security release provides a more secure access behaviour by default, and fixes incorrectly set menu items in Drupal core.

Users of Drupal 6.0 or 6.1 are encouraged to upgrade to 6.2 as soon as possible. This security issue doesn't affect users of Drupal's legacy branch, currently at 5.7.

It's long been efficient coding practice to reuse proven blocks of program code. After all, if you've already written something that works, why reinvent the wheel the next time you need the same function or operation? With open source coding, the resources for good, proven code are even greater. Thousands of solid scripts and code blocks are available for use in a new project, just by searching online. This not only improves reliability, since the code you borrow has already been battle-tested, but it also reduces development time and costs.

So why are there are so many social media sites apparently being developed from scratch?

I've discussed the positives of building a business site around a blog, or adding a blog to an existing site before. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also listed the pros and cons of converting a website to a blog format in a recent post. I believe that the interaction between you and your customers that a blog-style site can create is essential in today's business communications.

The number of businesses and organizations looking to develop seems to be growing every week. Jeff Whatcott of Acquia took a look at the number of job postings related to social applications and found a large disparity between those just looking for PHP programmers (which he assumes means they're planning to write their own code from the ground up) and those mentioning Drupal (which assumes they understand the advantage of starting with an established, robust content management platform). Jeff notes:

There are currently 816 social app building jobs mentioning PHP skills and only 89 mentioning Drupal skills. As you page through the actual job postings, you see evidence of lots of social publishing application development going on out there, but a lot of it appears to be heading down a path of custom PHP development.

So what's up with this? Drupal is the killer social publishing system. It's built on PHP. It saves a ton of time over building a custom system from scratch. Why are so many people who are friendly to LAMP and PHP in particular decide to reinventing the wheel? Which of the following do you think it is?

1. They've never heard of Drupal
2. They're vaguely aware, but not sure why it might be relevant to their projects
3. They've actively evaluated it in the past, but rejected it.
4. They know Drupal and like it in general, but it's just a poor fit for the current project for some reason

Companies that are looking to develop a next generation web site need to understand that content management systems have matured to a level where, at a basic administrative level, it's not a requirement to be a PHP expert to implement a CMS-based site. It's nice, but it's not absolutely essential unless you're looking to completely customize every element of the site. Requiring multiple years of experience in PHP and MySQL in order to qualify an applicant to create and maintain a WordPress, Drupal or Joomla-based site is like asking someone who'll be using Microsoft Word to be fluent in C++. It'd be nice, but hardly required for the task at hand.

From an evangelism point of view, those of us who are marketing these new technologies to clients need to emphasize the time and cost advantages of starting from a solid, proven base instead of building a web application from the ground up.

UPDATE: Nick Lewis weighs in with "Top 5 Reasons Developers Don't Use Drupal."

The Drupal Association announced the dates and location for the next Drupalcon on Monday. The event, which is expected to attract one thousand Drupal developers and devotees, will be held in Szeged, Hungary, from August 27th to 30th.

More details are available on drupal.org. Get your passports ready!

What's a Blogroll - Can I Get a Side of Friends with It? - by Nettie Hartsock from Beneath the Cover - "The best way I can explain a blogroll is that it’s a list of your favorite websites, bloggers you admire, and even blogs that might be good resources for your readership. I think it’s good to have a blogroll because it helps visitors to your blog understand what “neighborhood” you live in."

Open Source Business Conference Day 1 - by Jeff Whatcott from @FIRST_LIGHT - "The social publishing opportunity is even bigger than I thought. The need for integrated systems for publishing content, creating social networks, and enabling collaboration just keeps coming up again and again in panel discussions, customer interactions, and presentations."

The Ready, Fire, Aim, Reload Strategy for Social Media Success - by Brian Clark from copyblogger - "Let’s take a look at the mind and skill set that’s required to develop profitable new media assets with agile content development. It all comes down to understanding the social media feedback and iteration process."

Semantic Search - Web 3.0 for Drupal - by duvien from duvien.com - "Looks like the future is nearer than we expect. Semantic search is created by Jonathan Hendler. The original development was made possible by LINC and CivicActions. It uses an RDF store as a search index. It allows you to dynamically creates default search interfaces, for many searches per site, configurable via admin interfaces.

Website for blind and vision impaired developed with open source CMS - by Stan Beer from iTWire - "IT consultancy Energetica and not-for-profit benevolent group Media Access Australia, have developed a website specifically for the blind and vision impaired community. The site aims to overcome challenges blind and vision impaired users face when accessing websites by enabling far greater access to audio description."

A rather extensive test of the current versions of the two popular CMS packages was published yesterday on AllDrupalThemes.com. The results: Drupal 6.1 had faster pageload times than Joomla 1.5.1 in all four test setups. Tester "peach" notes that the absolute numbers are dependent on your server setup, but the comparisions between Joomla and Drupal should be valid in any case.

Commenter Sjakk Dekker suggested that Joomla's "global caching" only turns on view caching, not page caching (in which case it's not terribly global :) ). I can't confirm that since I'm not using version 1.5.1 for the one site I've developed with Joomla; I'm still using legacy version 1.0.15. It's potentially a significant point, however, and might have affected the results.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Tip of the hat to Bryan Ruby of CMSReport for pointing this one out.