Okay, so I guess my CAPTCHA has been broken on realjenius.com for a while now. I don’t know how long because nobody was able to comment or for that matter contact me through the contact form… because the CAPTCHA was broken.

I’d say I’m sorry, but… well, I’m not really. Anyway - you can comment again - enjoy!

Drupal 6 was released today after several months of development, and over 1600 issues being closed. Drupal 6.0rc4 was just released on February 8th, leaving the final release a mere week in the future. As is typical, contributed modules (many of which are fairly integral functionality for many users) are not all up to spec to the 6.0 infrastructure. As such, for some Drupal users, 5.0 may still be the best release for some time yet. Also of note, Drupal 6.0 is the last major Drupal release that will run on PHP 4 - as part of the Go PHP 5 initiative, Drupal is using their clout to help push the industry to PHP 5.2 - and Drupal 7 will be PHP 4 incompatible.

The changes in 6.0 are significant as usual - here are some of the interesting ones:

Life’s funny; today in my Google Reader tally I ran across this post by Steven Wittens - titled ‘On not doing Drupal anymore’, and it helped put some personal frustrations in to perspective for me on the concept of ‘burnout’ in the modern open development age.

How do you improve Drupal performance on Dreamhost? It’s a trick question - the answer is move to MediaTemple.

If you’re reading this, then you have hit the new MediaTemple(dv)-hosted Realjenius.com - and you have met one much happier R.J.

I’ve previously talked about tuning Drupal for weblogs here previously. I’d like to elaborate more today, on specifically running Drupal on Dreamhost.

Tonight I upgraded realjenius.com to Drupal 5.2, and I was hit with an interesting problem for the 2nd time - after upgrading my site, I went to update.php (as per the upgrade instructions) and was confronted with an ‘Access Denied’ error. The instructions are clear that you should stay logged in as an Admin during this process, and I assure you, I was, but for whatever reason no matter how many times I do these full Drupal upgrades, I lose my login access after the upgrade.

Over at Drupal.org a new Drupal 6 Status Update was just published. Several new changes are listed, many of them quite exciting:

1. Numerous installer improvements, including the ability to import translations for enabled modules automatically in the installer and the ability to specify numerous settings at install time (administrator (user number 1) credentials, clean URLs, timezone).

Choosing Drupal (or another similar technology such as Joomla) for producing a community managed website is generally a fairly easy process. Content management systems have become so mature and configurable that there is little they can’t do when it comes to a content-oriented presence.

In my new website infrastructure, I make heavy use of both Drupal and Gallery, both of which are PHP web applications, and by some definition of the term, both of which are content management systems.

The installation process for each is quite painless and, in a largely unheard of fashion for me (someone coming from the Java web-app world), both have graphical installers to guide you through the database creation process, as well as setting up the first mandatory users and content.