The White House's official internet home recently refreshed with Drupal as their foundation. Upon hearing the news, I, like so many open-source evangelists, was elated. Big win for Drupal and the open-source community.

Testing against an exact copy of a live site is essential to successful Drupal deployments. This, unfortunately, can be both time consuming and mind-numbingly tedious. If, for example, something goes wrong with an update script that changes the database schema you need to fix the issue, rebuild the database, and test again. A potentially laborious task.

The process involves some variation of the following:

When developing a Drupal site, there's a constant sense of deja-vu. "I know I've done this before!" As with many things in life, it becomes a race to do it faster this time than you did the last.

Smashing Magazine recently called out a potential security risk with SVN that I think is worth reposting here. This isn't an SVN vulnerability that needs a patch, but rather a symptom of poor deployment practices that are easily avoided. Here's how:

So here’s the short version: Artist makes a cute little robot. Robot carries a flag with a destination written on it. Robot is set loose on the streets of New York City. Passersby see the little robot, figure out where it is going, and help redirect it towards its goal. Unfailingly, the robot always made it to its specified destination.

Drupal and Joomla are the two most popular open-source cms solutions around, and there is a long-running debate as to which is the superior product. After having worked with both, I am ready to choose a side:

Drupal is the superior CMS.