I recently came across a very helpful review of “Cracking Drupal” by Chris Shattuck. Here at Infoswell we are constantly building Drupal sites and communities for our publishers, so having access to good Drupal resources is a must. I have included an excerpt from the article and recommend that you visit Chris’s site and read the review in it’s entirety.

It recently came to my attention that there are some gaps in my conceptualization of Drupal security. I was fortunate enough to have this pointed out to me by the Drupal Security Team, and not by a DOS, CSFR, SQL injection or XSS attack. After publicly bemoaning the mild lashing I received, four members of the Drupal community suggested I read Cracking Drupal. One of them even sent me a copy. No other book was even mentioned, which says to me that – considering how recently it was released – the book fills a void of knowledge that was seriously aching for coverage, and fills it well.

Over years of developing, I’ve become familiar with the various vulnerabilities that make their way into code, but I’ve never felt like I could build a complete defense. My knowledge has been piecemeal, drawing from documentation, books, interesting conversations and other people’s code. In my case, Cracking Drupal did a fantastic job of gluing these pieces together into a comprehensive frame of mind.

What becomes clear very quickly in Cracking Drupal is that Drupal is quite a wily beast that gives developers real incentive to learn security. There are few functions in Drupal whose exclusive purpose is security, and Greg makes it clear that learning how to secure your site has definite side benefits: “When developers learn and use the API, they are not only safer but more effective and more efficient.” When you learn how to use different aspects of the Drupal API (forms, translations, helper functions, theming) you gain bits of security as a bonus. If you set out to learn Drupal security, you’ll come out the other end with a pretty solid grasp of Drupal APIs. Either way, it’s a win.

Read the review in its entirety here.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the book, as well as what Druapl books and resources you have found helpful.

Magazine CMS (Content Management Systems) for magazine publisher websites is becoming more complex in terms of requirements for the publication online needs. The new social readership aspects of confirming the niche ownership online has become a top priority.

Open source cms software for publishers has another advantage over commercial cms in this area. First, we find that open source publisher cms tools often contain the tags, social widget, and community collaboration features ahead of when these features surface in traditional enterprise web publishing systems.

Magazine CMS Software - Open Source

Drupal is one example of a CMS that has allowed us to create very complex and custom feature sets for clients. The Drupal CMS provides us many opportunities to design a magazine website with both the style, function, and social features to support the readership, circulation development, and advertiser features requested.

While there are many other cms comparison factors we use to select a specific CMS tool for a magazine publisher’s website we have found that most of the open source cms tools now perform better than traditional commercial packages that often we harder to manage.

The good new for publishers is that they can use open source with a higher capability index and we can easily demonstrate that those that claim a higher cost of ownership for open source are not accurate or not familiar with the latest magazine cms software tools.