Win a Copy of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook – Blog Contest

I’m excited to announce a new blog contest at the Coding Pad today!! 🙂 In partnership with Dorien Herremans, author of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook, we will be running a blog contest focused on building community websites with Drupal.

I’ve been building a series of Drupal beginner tutorials here, but I’m sure you’re itching to learn more, build more, and explore Drupal’s power past the basics. Well, here’s a suggestion for you – build a community website!! How?  By getting and learning, and working along with an excellent book – Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook!! 🙂

Up for grabs are three copies of this awesome ebook that walks you step by step through the process of building a Community Website using Drupal.  I wrote my inital impressions about this book in a prior blog post (Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide Book – Initial Impressions) –  and since then have continued to be impressed by the author’s approach and the content of the book.

How to Enter:

It’s real easy!

Continue reading “Win a Copy of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook – Blog Contest”

Gauging User Interest – MODx vs. Drupal

This post was inspired by a conversation on Twitter, where @ShaneSponagle, my buddy and MODx guru extraordinaire 🙂 asked me what my blog stats looked like with respect to interest in MODx vs. Drupal, since I blog about both platforms.  What I’m going to present here is a simple, and yet not so simple answer to that question.

Some disclaimers before I start:

  1. I’m not an expert on either platform, I just share what I know and I’m learning
  2. I’m not an expert at statistics or interpreting them
  3. I’m not making any statements about which CMS is “better” or “more popular” than the other
  4. In the grand scheme of things, I’m a small fish and this blog is just a small portion of the web, and so I don’t pretend to represent any global trends

That said, I think there’s some moderately good basis for comparison for three simple reasons:

  1. I am working concurrently on two tutorial sets, one for Drupal and one for MODx
  2. They are both aimed at complete newbies, so the audience is comparable
  3. A lot of my top hits and searched are on posts in either tutorial series, with the exception of two other posts (one on Fedora and the other on splitting CSV files).

Continue reading “Gauging User Interest – MODx vs. Drupal”

Building a Website with MODx for Newbies – Part 6: Introducing Template Variables

Welcome to part 6 of our series of tutorials on building a website with MODx CMS.  So far we’ve looked at:

Part 1: Introduction to MODx
Part 2: Installing MODx
Part 3: Working with Templates
Part 4: Introducing Chunks
Part 5: Introducing Snippets

As we work through these tutorials, we’re building a MODx resource site called Learn MODx.  In the last installment we introduced snippets and learned how to use them to add functionality to our website.  Specifically, we used the Wayfinder snippet to create a basic functional navigation system for our website.  So far our website looks like this:  (you can click on the images to see a larger view)

tut5modxcms81

In this post, we’re going to continue to explore the basics of MODx by looking at Template Variables  (TVs).  We will add some more functionality and features to our site and move  a step forward in our MODx knowledge.

Continue reading “Building a Website with MODx for Newbies – Part 6: Introducing Template Variables”

Get 5 Free Computer eBooks this week only from Packt Publishing

Packt Publishing, one of the sponsors of our MODx Blog Contest, are celebrating their fifth anniversary this week!!  As part of their anniversary celebrations, Packt will be giving away a free ebook each day this week!! All you need is an account at Packt.  Other offerings over the next five weeks will include:

  • Buy 5 books for $99
  • Buy the book, get the eBook free
  • Competitions with 5 special prizes
  • Buy 2 eBooks, get the 3rd free

This is not an offer to be missed. Today’s offering is a free copy of the book  Building Online Communities with phpBB. So hurry over and celebrate with Packt!  You can read all the details here.

For updates and more good stuff, be sure to follow @packtpub on Twitter.

Akismet + WP SpamFree = Happy WordPress Blogging

Blog comment spam is inevitable.  That’s just the reality.  Akismet and WP-SpamFree are two plugins that together have saved me a lot of time moderating comments on my blog.

Just a quick look at my most recent spam stats since I activated the two – I first activated Akismet and then realized I needed more:

spamstats

Now I’m still a small fish in the world of blogging, but I can honestly say these two plugins are life savers.  Akismet comes preinstalled with recent versions of WordPress, and you can download WP Spamfree from Scott Allen’s website .  You can leave him a nice thank you or follow him on Twitter (@TheWebGeek) and say thanks to him there.  You can also WP SpamFree on Twitter (@WP-SpamFree) 🙂

What plugins/strategies do you find useful for fighting spam on your wordpress blog?