Drupal

Why? I had to stay up late working on for the upgrade of Tecito.com. For those who are not familiar with the name, it is a well known site in the Latin community in Canada, especially in Vancouver.

The site uses Drupal, a powerful CMS system. Without going too much into details, i decided to upgrade the site to the newest version of Drupal, 6.5. Tecito was using version 5.X before. I took advantage of the long weekend.

I had some minor issues with the upgrade, found problems with the modules in use, a few of them are not fully compatible with Drupal 6.x. The database was backed up frequently, install and uninstall modules often, a the end, the upgrade was successful.

The site was launched today, check it out. http://tecito.com

A quote from the creators page:
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted - i.e. "spam" - or desirable - i.e. "ham."

This module does a wonderful job in blocking spammers from my site. When someone posts a comment, for example, Mollom sends the data to http://mollom.com, it goes through an analysis, it then returns the content back and classifies it as 'Spam' or 'Ham, now if it is unsure as of what to do with the information, it tags it as 'Unsure', it then presents it to the visitor with a CAPTCHA challenge.

You don't need to know all the details about how it works, just know that it guards your web site against spammers, so you can focus your time on generating content for your blog.

Mollom is a module that was initially written for http://drupal.org, but has now been ported to other CMS platforms. Here is a version for WordPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mollom/ and for Joomla http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,v...

If you have a Drupal site and you would like to install it, visit http://drupal.org/project/mollom, the main page is at http://mollom.com

There appears to be a need in Vancouver for a Drupal group, so i have created one. The group will inform, educate and teach individuals who are interested in learning about the best CMS platform around - and it is open source.

There are so companies already using Drupal, from individuals, companies or corporations, universities, communities to government departments. Drupal is powerful, customizable, extensible and community driven support.

Setting up a personal blog, a community site or a school web page can be a challenging task - Drupal makes it easy. The group is intended for beginners and intermediate level, however, advanced users are welcome to join.

Once we have a good number of individuals in the group, we will try to do a Drupal gathering every month or twice a month, depending on the feedback.

The Drupal Group is set in Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32800838904, or add me as your friend then join the group - hecmor@gmail.com