cms

Presenting on Drupal Dev Environments and Migrations at CMS Philly on May 1st

Friend and former colleague Chris Urban and I will be presenting the results of the 2020 Drupal Local Development Survey at CMS Philly—which is now a virtual event—on May 1st. You can find more information about the session here: 2020 Developer Tool Survey Results. I'll also be posting the survey results on this blog soon after.

Chris also coaxed me into talking about my ongoing Drupal 7 to 8 migration saga in a separate session, so if you've missed the first 13 live stream episodes, check out the session How I'm migrating JeffGeerling.com from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 to get caught up—then subscribe to my YouTube channel to see how it all ends 🤪.

It remains to be seen whether Chris and I will be wearing Hawaiian shirts during the session:

Questions about Wordpress

Having been away from the WordPress scene since version 2.x days (I think the last time I launched a WordPress website was around 2009), I recently had reason to develop some WordPress plugins, and I wanted to ask some questions about the WordPress coding standards and API that I hope will help enlighten me (and, maybe, other PHP developers coming from other frameworks/platforms to WordPress).

Here are some questions I've had while working on my first WordPress plugin (coming purely from the development side—I'm deliberately ignoring any mention of WordPress's UI, as I don't want to inspire any trolling along the lines of 'WordPress vs. [Another CMS]'):

Preventing Form Spam

Spam email folder - Gmail interface

There are many different techniques for preventing form spam on your website, and an important component of the battle against spam is your constant struggle between giving your 'real' users a good experience while preventing spammers and automated bots from spamming you and lowering the quality of the content on your website.

A Constant User-Experience Battle

Usually, the first thing someone will do after having trouble fighting spammers by manual comment/content moderation is place a complex CAPTCHA system on their forms. Something like this:

Spam CAPTCHA text difficult to read

Drupal: 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS!

Packt publishing just announced earlier this morning that Drupal has won the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS award!

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

Joomla was the second place winner (kudos to them as well!); read the original release here.

With Drupal being used on Whitehouse.gov, AT&T's mobile apps website, and countless other corporate sites and subsites, it's a good time to be in the Open Source arena!

More award categories will be announced soon!

From OSC: Caching a Page; Saving a Server

I posted a story over on Open Source Catholic today concerning page caching and its importance for saving a server under a heavy load (read: the slashdot effect). You can save a lot of resources on your server by not only using built-in page caching on your favorite CMS, but also exploring further options (for Drupal, there's Boost (read our case study on Boost); for WordPress, there's WP Super Cache). From OSC:

A couple months ago, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis announced that a new Archbishop had been chosen (then-Archbishop-elect Robert J. Carlson). For the announcement, the Archdiocese streamed the press conference online, then posted pictures on the St. Louis Review website of the day's events (updated every hour or two).