I’ve just installed the Mollom module for Drupal, lets see how it works. I’ve read so much praise on the official Drupal Planet (read for example this, this or that) that I could no longer resist. Installation and setup is a breeze, OpenID is supported on the Mollom website.
As you might have read I’ve ported the Spam module for Drupal 6. It worked fine. Haven’t got a problem with it at all. But I recon Mollom is the way to go.
Drupal is such a pleasing piece of software.
Just a few days ago I found some very cool new (to me) hidden functionality. Additionally I’ve installed some more modules which I want others to be aware of.
Let’s start with the “hidden” functionality: Drupal 6 incorporates some parts of a Drupal 5 module which notifies you about available updates (see /admin/reports/updates). Pretty easy to stay updated with that alone. But I thought I’d had to check that page frequently for new updates. Not so! Say hello to the tab “Settings” on the very page and insert your email address to stay updated via email. Satisfying and built-in… dumb me searches in vain for a module with that functionality…
Yet it brought my interest to other useful modules:
The Logging and alerts module gives you a way to send emails to an email address of your choice in case of errors etc. Pretty neat since I don’t want to lose time by regularly scanning my log entries…
Today at work I had my first contact with Redaxo, a German contact management system written in PHP and based on MySQL. I’ve heard of it before but never used it, there always seemed to exist better solutions - Drupal for example. But the company I work for already committed itself to Redaxo for this client. So no chance to work with Drupal this time - a pity.
But new experience with other solutions is a great thing. I thought Redaxo had its right to exist: its very small.
Here I don’t mean the filesize or whatever - I mean the size of the admin panel to begin with. It has not that many features. It’s very easy to understand. The average John Doe which is not that websavvy wont be confused by a multitude of choices. And I think I got to know pretty much all of Redaxo in just a few hours — which I can’t say about the steep learning curve of Drupal. And since the website of this client will be small I first thought Redaxo will do quite good.
The deeper I dug into Redaxo the more annoyed I got by its shortcomings though: There are modules and addons with which you can do pretty much all you need. But not one module I used was ready out of the box. Always I had to do adjustments. Drupal does much better here. And what you can do with overloading in Drupal is millions of light years ahead of what Redaxo is able to do. Oh and the developers of Redaxo really should take a look at Drupals documentation! After some searching on the official website I stuck to grep -R "function XXX" . for Api references…
I’ve got a pretty well working spam module for Drupal 6 now. Please test it, you can get the most up-to-date tarball here:
Take the last tarball available, should be the best. I’m planning on testing it live on this site. On my localhost testbox it worked pretty well.
Yes! I’ve finally done it. I’ve moved my website to Drupal, which is so much better than my old 3co stuff. Tons of great modules out there and those I couldn’t find for Drupal 6, which was recently released, I ported. Well not all of them, there are still some I’m really looking forward. On the top of my list are definitely the spam module and the Akismet module. Minutes after my move I got my first spam comment…
Well let’s see how I might get involved into Drupal development. I already filed some patches for the following modules: