Drupal (a blogging platform) users will be excited today to see Drupal 4.7.0 has been released. New features include:
- Multiple Block Regions: Were you feeling constrained by only two choices for block placement? You can now dynamically specify as many block placement locations as you want.
- ‘Offline for Maintenance’ Configuration: You can now easily configure your site to display a friendly notice to visitors when you have to take down your site for maintenance.
- Free Tagging Support: Free tagging functionality is now built into the taxonomy system.
- Site-Wide Contact Form: You can now easily enable a contact form page that will let you easily collect feedback from your site visitors.
- Author Information Block: There is now a block you can enable that will display author information alongside posts.
- Public/Private Profile Fields: You can now specify permissions for profiles on a per-field basis.
- Block by IPs/Hostname: It is now possible to block users by their IP address or Hostnames. Good bye trolls!
- Aggregator now Supports Atom: It is now finally possible to aggregate Atom formatted feeds like those created by Blogger.
- Aggregator Generates RSS Feeds: It’s now easier than ever to use Drupal to power ‘Planet’ like sites.
- RSS Feed Settings You can now configure how much content and how many items to publish in your RSS feed.
- Better Search Index: The search module indexer is now smarter and more robust
- Advanced Search Operators: You can now search by advanced search operators (e.g. phrase, node type, etc.)
- Custom Search Results Ranking: The search module now lets you weight search results by keyword relevance, date of post, number of comments, and number of views.
found via an IM from Regan
Happy day! Happy day! My site runs on Drupal v4.6. I’ve been waiting for this upgrade for months.
I won’t be writing content the rest of this week, I’ll be tweaking my site with the best damn CMS on earth.
to be fair I wouldn’t call drupal a blogging platform, it’s more on a CMS with strong blogging abilities.
It nice to see that there are a lot of different blogging tools out there to choose from.
I know what you mean Paul. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time too! Hopefully the upgrade will be painless… however, I fear the worst
I tried drupal once, it’s cool. But I found WP to be more easier to tweak around, I’m not that fluent in PHP yet. But this new version will certainly be fun to play around with.
I think a few people actually called Drupal a CMSMS — a content-management-system management system. It is a nice platform for PHP developers to build their own CMS with ease. Very extensible.
It’s also one of the most “procedural” (vs object-oriented) systems I’ve ever worked with. The core functions are preceded with some identifier naming it as a Drupal function and the module they’re in, and there’s basically just two “levels”: the files in the includes directory and the modules. And, the modules are interdependent, with node calling taxonomy which calls node, etc. And, all the magic constants.
I used Drupal on my business site late last year and it is a great system to use as a non-developer. Ultimately I had my heart set on a MovableType blog and moved across after a short time experimenting with Drupal 4.6. If I were to ever go back to a CMS, Drupal would be right up there in my list of candidates (together with Joomla/Mambo).
WordPress and MovableType are great pieces of software but they are not CMS’s of the same ilk as Drupal and the others.
If you want a blog only site, go with WordPress, MovableType etc, but if you a blog/news site with CMS features, then go with Drupal. You can run multiple installations from the same database.
Correction to the above: “The core functions are preceded with some identifier naming it as a Drupal function and the module they’re in” is reversed: they are NOT preceded with some sort of Drupal identifier.
I run my online magazine and blog on Drupal 4.6, and it’s incredibly powerful. I had a list of things to develop for my site, but I might hold off and bungle through the upgrade first. I’m glad to see it mentioned here, Darren.
In spite of Drupal isn’t easy to install and have a high learning curve, it is great, stable and powerful CMS system. Drupal is more then just blogging platform. I like some great featrues like friendly URL or Threaded comments.