Drupal

I have been using Akisment for spam blocking here, and on other sites that I run or manage. Plugin/module is available for both Wordpress and for Drupal. It has been a great service for stopping spam on their tracks and saving a lot of my precious time. Lately though, I have seen an increasing number of spam slip through its filtering algorithms.  Since this is happening for all the Wordpress and Drupal sites, it cannot be something due to the sites themselves.

I think it is time to think about the other options.

There is Defensio. It has a Wordpress plugin but no Drupal module as of this date. But it seems to be pretty good, and my friend Mayank seems to be pretty pleased with Defensio.

Then there is Mollum, an endevour by Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) and Benjamin Schrauwen. It obviously has a module for Drupal, but does not yet have a plugin for Wordpress.

This is something I need to dig into a bit. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

It is irritating when people ask trival questions on Drupal without making an effort to search and find answers from documentation. It is even more irritating when they ping you on IM.

I understand that a trivial thing for one is not the same for another. And we all did not know anything before and we too took help to learn Drupal. But the issue is, it is quite evident from the way they ask these questions, that they have made a zero effort to find the answers from the documentations available. It becomes even more evident when they ask you a question, you give them the link to the specific documentation page, and they come right back at you asking for a step by step procedure. And they want it now.  It is really annoying.

Here are some of the proper and more efficient ways of getting help on Drupal.

1. Install a test Drupal instance and play around with it. Trust me - you learn a lot from just twiddling around with the settings.
2. Head over to Drupal Handbooks - almost everything about the core is covered there.
3. Search for answers at Drupal Forums. Only when you do not find, post a question there.
4. Search answers using Google or Yahoo. There are many who write their experiences with Drupal on their blogs. The search engine spiders do a good job of indexing them.
5. And even after all these, do not IM people asking questions. Even mailing them is not considered appropriate, but I myself do not mind that. The proper way to interact with someone is to go to the #drupal-support IRC channel at freenode.

When you do find answers, contribute back by posting it in the forums, document it, or even blog about it if you have blog. This way, the next person facing the same question can find the answer.

This news snuck up on me. My feed reader reported that Drupal 6 has been released.

Drupal 6.0 Released

I got a lot of work to do. I manage a handful of websites other than mine that run on Drupal. They are presently all on 5.x and needs a upgrade path to be mapped. This would involve, basically checking which contributed modules are used and have they been upgraded.

I need to work on the Webcomics 6.x Battle Plan too!