Just a short note to say that WordPress 3.0 has recently been released. It’s a milestone release for the blog software, and includes some major leaps forward:

• Brand new default theme, the highly customizable Twenty Ten. The theme supports easily customisable tiled backgrounds and header images to help you create a custom look with little effort. Coolest thing about this? You can specify a header image for each post if you want!
• Support for new customisable hierarchical navigational menus. Easy to manage, drag and drop and no need to worry about code!
• WordPress multiuser has been merged with core, allowing each and every WordPress installation to operate as a Multiuser installation if the mood takes you. No word on how to activate this just yet, but…wow.
• Support for custom post types. It used to be Blog posts with some support for single pages. Now you can create custom post types for just about anything you fancy – like events, product listings, etc. That almost brings WordPress in line with Drupal!
• For the twitter power users – built-in support for short links.
• Easy bulk updating of plugins, core WordPress and themes.

Check out the video showing some of the new features in this version of WordPress. I think it’s good that they’re taking a little break after this release to concentrate on features for the wordpress.org site. They’re clearly anticipating an upswing in WordPress users after this – and it’ll probably happen too. This version of WordPress looks far more versatile than anything that’s gone before it.

Being a WordPress devotee, the shocking thing about Drupal is that it doesn’t have a backup utility built into the core system. Any content management system that relies upon a back-end database should provide a way to back that database up regularly.

Shockingly, Drupal doesn’t. But it does have a dedicated community, and there are a number of options out there for backing up your database. The one which I’ve been using lately is the Backup/Migrate module.

This module makes it easy to do both on-demand and scheduled backups of your Drupal installation. With the on-demand backups, you can download them to your computer immediately. The scheduled backup saves the files to your webserver for downloading at a later date, and you can specify how regularly to back up and how many backup files to keep, so it’ll do the housekeeping for you as well.

Because Drupal uses relative hyperlinks by default, you can download an entire live website to a local server and use it to test themes, modules and Drupal upgrades without affecting the live environment.

This is more useful than you’d believe. I recently upgraded a Drupal site I manage, and the upgrade failed. I couldn’t get access to the site and thought it was ruined. However, I installed Drupal 5.1 on a local webserver and restored the database backup to that. I then upgraded that installation to Drupal 6.2 successfully. With a completely recovered and upgraded database, I was able to put this on the live webserver. We were up and running again relatively quickly.

I decided after that to test all my Drupal upgrades on a local server before doing the upgrade on a live website!

What’s missing (in my opinion) is a way to back up the uploaded files, themes and modules that each Drupal site contains. I want to look at some way to set up FTP synchronisation to back up site files on a scheduled basis.

If you’ve got any suggestions, please share!

Drupal 6 offers built-in actions that can be performed whenever something happens on your site. Typically, you want to use this to get an alert when someone publishes content on the site, or a new user signs up.

You might even want to mimic WordPress and get an email alert every time someone leaves a comment on the site. I’m going to show you how to set this up for your site.

Defining Triggers and Actions

First, let’s take a look at what triggers and actions actually are. A trigger is an event which will happen on your site. Triggers that I can see on my site are Comments, Content, Cron, Taxonomy and Users.

If you look at the available triggers for Comments, you’ll see various trigger types. The one we’re interested in is “After saving a new comment”.

Before you can activate a trigger, you need to specify an Action. This is the action you want to happen each time a trigger is ..er.. triggered. You can do a number of things with actions, such as redirect users to a URL or give them a message on the page. However, we’re mostly interested in the Send Email action.

Step By Step Instructions

OK. So let’s set up a simple action and trigger combo to send us an email each time a comment is left on our Drupal site.

• Before you start: Make sure you’ve got the trigger module activated. Browse to Administer -> Site Building -> Modules and check that Trigger is enabled. If not, switch it on, obviously!
• Now, let’s set up our action – browse to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Actions. Drop down the Make a new advanced action box and select Send e-mail. Click Create.
• Set up your alert email with an easy to recognise Description and Subject – I used “New Comment on [Sitename]” for mine. Enter the email address of the person who’s supposed to receive the alert (probably you) and then enter a short message – you should see some variables underneath the text field showing variables you can use.
• Save your changes et voila, your action is configured. Now to attach it to a trigger…
• Browse to the Trigger page in Adminster -> Site Building -> Triggers. Click the Comments tab and drop down the list underneath After saving a new comment. You should see your email in the list – select it and click Assign.
• Job done – your action has been configured.

Don’t Forget To Test

You didn’t think we were finished yet, did you? Now you need to test that the triggers are working correctly.

Just to approach this as a regular site visitor, log out of your Drupal site. Or, if you’re smart like me, just fire up another web browser where you’re not logged on to the site (that way, you can still use the admin part of Drupal in your main browser and test the average user experience in the other).

Simply visit any blog post on the site (or any node that allows comments) and leave a comment on that post. Now, head on over to your email inbox and wait for that alert to arrive. Mine arrived in just a couple of minutes.

Developers Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen have announced the release of an all new anti-comment spam system called Mollom. Since Dries is the mastermind behind the community-building CMS Drupal, Mollom seems to have a wider remit than you might find with comparable systems like Akismet.

They’re not just going after the usual automated comment spam that most anti-spam focuses on. Mollom allows you to look at the entire spectrum of user contributed content and analyse it against a number of factors: spam, offensive/inflammatory content, aggressive content, etc.

I’ve installed the Mollom module on my personal Drupal website and I’m thinking seriously about installing it on a couple of other Drupal sites that I’m working on that are getting hit heavily with user account spam*. There’s an option in the config page for Mollom that indicates it can watch out for spam user accounts, which will be a godsend for anyone who runs an open community.

What Does Mollom Protect?

Well, looking at the configuration page (in Drupal 6), you can protect all your contact and comment forms, user registration and password request forms and input forms for any node type, such as blogs, pages, polls and stories. That’s pretty cool and covers all the possible ways a user (or a spam-bot) might try to enter spam on your site.

Effectiveness?

It’s too early to say. Give it a couple of days and we’ll see. My personal blog isn’t very heavily trafficked, so I may install it on another community site I’m working on to see how it handles user account and content spam.

Mollom works on three classifications: good content, bad content and content it is unsure of. When it’s unable to make a classification, Mollom will present a CAPTCHA box to the user to verify their input.

Getting Started With Mollom

There’s a fairly comprehensive post about Mollom over on Dries Buytaert’s blog that should get you up and running in no time. Unlike Akismet, which allows you to use the same key across multiple websites, Mollom requires you to create a key set for each website you plan to run it on.

It only takes a moment or two to get up and running, so visit the Mollom website for more information.

* User accounts that are created by software for the purposes of spamming.

I suppose until very recently, I’ve shirked away from online forums as places to contribute. Generally, I’d be promiscuous and visit loads of blogs dropping comments where I had something to say and moving on. I never thought of forums as places to build communities until recently.

We started up a forum on our reality TV website. It bombed. We wiped it out, figuring there wasn’t much of a market for a forum in the space (especially since there were better established alternatives).

A few months later, after looking at some of the communities these forums generated, we decided we wanted to try again, but with a different focus.

We reinstated the forum using the free and excellent Simple Machines forum software and started posting on it. Since then, the forum has experienced dramatic growth, and here are some of the reasons why:

• Invite An Audience: We asked regular commenters and contributors on the blog to join. Many did, and this lead to us getting to know each other better.
• Promote It! We lifted the RSS feed from the forum and republished the recent posts on the homepage, which lead to greater click-through. It helped people actually discover the forum!
• We also promoted the forum in other ways – an advert beneath each post encouraging signups was one. Another was by creating a menu under the site logo with links to “Blog” and “Forum” clearly displayed.
• Create content: In the early days, it was important to generate content on the blog, so we’d post about big news items on the blog and the forum. We didn’t want visitors landing in a barren forum!
• Respond. In building the forum, we interacted with our members and got to know them better. Because we’re actively involved in the discussions, we know what shows people like and dislike and we’ve been able to set a fairly mature tone for the forum which keeps insults to a minimum!
• Kill Trolls Quickly! We don’t often get trolls on our forum, but when we do we shoot them down with a total ban/account deletion. A side effect of our community is that we’ve become very protective of our members. They don’t deserve to be abused or insulted. Long time members are fine, but if a new member is abusive, they’re shown the door!

To hide the sidebar subscriptions list in Reader, simply press the “u” key and it’ll disappear. Press “u” again to make the sidebar reappear.

Doing this can cause the reading pane to jump about a bit, but if you’re stuck for space on a low-resolution monitor, you just might find this useful. Alternatively, go out and buy a bigger monitor.

Favourite Google Reader keyboard shortcuts at the moment are “j” and “k” to move to the next and previous posts respectively. What are yours?

I mentioned a while back that it was possible to republish RSS feeds from your forum on your blog.

How do we achieve this? Well, it’s quite easy actually. With the WordPress RSS widget, you can display the titles from just about any RSS feed you can hook into.

Getting The RSS URL You Want

Right, so let’s look at our Simple Machines forum and see how to extract the latest posts to RSS. Here’s my forum. It’s divided into several categories, with boards for specific topics. You can fetch an RSS feed for any board or topic easily….if you know how to structure the URL.

Categories

Let’s say we want to display the latest posts in my Reality TV category. The URL looks something like this /index.php?action=collapse;c=4;sa=collapse;#4. The key part of the querystring is c=4, which identifies the category. Now, to get Simple Machines Forum to output the category as RSS, let’s recraft the URL a little bit:

/index.php?c=4;type=rss;action=.xml;limit=20

The additional parameters tell SMF to output the category as RSS and show a maximum of 20 items.

Topics

If you wanted to use a specific topic, you can replace the c=4 with board=16.0. Your URL might look something like this:

/index.php?board=16.0;type=rss;action=.xml;limit=20

Setting Up Your WordPress RSS Widget

Now comes the easy bit – adding the feed to WordPress. Go into your wp-admin area and browse to Presentation and then to Sidebar Widgets. Drag in a new RSS Widget to the place in the sidebar you want the widget to appear. Click the configure icon, then paste in the URL you created above.

Once you save your widget, it will instantly on the website (see below).

The only disadvantage is – as you can see from the illustration above – the RSS feed tends to display individual responses, so if you’ve got a string of replies to a thread, that title will be repeated loads of times.