Yahoo was recently looking for a Content Management System to facilitate communication on pattern design amongst several portions of the company. They evaluated the top CMS systems available and settled on Drupal. "Ultimately, we chose Drupal because of its breadth of capabilities, powerful taxonomy, and extensibility."

I've been giving talks and demos recently of Drupal. There is a best practices guide on the Drupal website but it does not cover some of the things I'd like to figure out.

I've come up with a very nice setup that uses DNS wildcards to send all traffic for a domain (and any sub-domain) to a given server. Apache is then configured to pass it all to Drupal. The enhanced sites functionality in 4.6 is great. Almost. It allows a great deal of flexibility, but there is a database sync issue. I want to give a blank database to each person who signs up for a site. But, I want to give more than the skeleton modules. This isn't too bad to setup one "skeleton" database and copy it each time a new request is made.

Until it comes to updates. Now I've got 100 databases with content in them and an upgrade comes along. Now it is time to upgrade all the databases. Or a new module comes out and we want to use it. So either each database has to be updated or the installation has to be frozen for long periods of time.

Another area I'm working on, in part because of the lousy satellite internet, is synching multiple Drupal installations. For speed and sanity reasons I want to do the editing of templates and most content locally and then have it sync to the central installation(s) of Drupal. No sleep for the weary!

You're looking at this post which means you're seeing the new and improved Adding Understanding. We've moved to our permeant home for the next several years and upgraded to Drupal 4.6.

So far the only major stumbling block has been the lack of Network Solutions site working. For the last several hours a successful login is met with "We're sorry but we cannot process your request at this time. Please try again or select from the options below." Of course the options below will allow me to register new domains with them.... yeah... I'm likely to do that. I'll likely try Register Fly for the next bout. It had been a toss up between Register Fly and Go Daddy but Register Fly includes DNS and Go Daddy doesn't. Easy choice. Read more about Move and upgrade

I'm experimenting with a new theme that I really like so far. A few display quirks in Safari and I'll have to re-work a header graphic.

Update: Back to the old for a while as the new theme was missing tabs for little things like being able to edit pages.