Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

• Drupal turned 6, got the 5.0 release and some cookies as birthday present.
• Wikipedia turned 6, now contains more than 1,500,000 articles...

Interesting day.

I have upgraded my website/blog/podcast/photoblog/linkblog/whatever to Drupal 5.0-rc1 today (I'll skip 5.0-rc2 for now and wait for the final release of 5.0 for the next upgrade).

The upgrade went quite nice, even though I had to upgrade several modules and port quite a bunch of custom hacks I had on my old (Drupal 4.6) site. I first upgraded to 4.7, then to 5.0 (as is the recommended procedure) on a test-site, and after figuring out how to fix or work-around all the issues that appeared, I upgraded the live site.

I password-protected the site during the upgrade, that's why it wasn't available for a while today (and caused some problems on Planet Debian it seems, sorry for that!).

New features you might enjoy:

• Every blog post, podcast entry, and photo/image has an AJAX-enabled voting/rating box now, thanks to the nice jRating module. Feel free to rate any content over here, I'm eager to know what you think.
• The Service links module provides those tiny images in each post, which allow you to submit the post to del.icio.us, Digg, etc. etc. with a single click.
• I now use the great new standard Drupal-Theme Garland with a custom color map. I really like it.
• Tons of small changes here and there, removing custom hacks which are now obsoleted with the new Drupal release, shuffling some menus around etc. etc.

If you notice any bugs or problems with the site, please let me know.

The blog post Drupal vs. Joomla - Fight! pointed me to a discussion on the drupal-devel mailing list about the ohloh.net website which tries to gather some statistics/metrics about the code of Free Software projects. Their slogan:

Explore Open Source

Mapping the open source world by collecting
objective information on open source projects.

You might want to read their Terms of Use, though, which don't sound very open...

Anyway, their stats about Drupal and about Joomla! are flawed (for example) because they seem to include the whole contrib CVS tree of Drupal (not just the core Drupal), which is huuuge. But there's no need to use any fancy website anyway, there are Free Software tools out there which can produce some metrics, too.

The following data is generated using David A. Wheeler's SLOCCount (for the respective tarballs of the current stable releases):

Drupal 4.7.4

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 8,012
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 1.78 (21.34)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 0.67 (8.00)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 2.67
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 240,198
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

Joomla 1.0.11

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 65,880
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 16.25 (194.94)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 1.54 (18.54)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 10.51
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 2,194,486
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

Not that I think these numbers mean anything ;-) Lines of Code is a very, very unreliable indicator for code quality (or anything else, for that matter)...

Wheee! Drupal 4.7.0, the new stable release of the CMS, has been released. After more than one year of development, we are now finally able to enjoy all the goodies which this new release brings.

For German speaking people we can now proudly claim to have a completed translation of the user interface, thanks to all the contributors! If you don't speak German, you can choose from one of the other 40+ translations for your site.

Read the release announcement for more information, I'm off upgrading a couple of sites now ;)

Recently, I've had the pleasure to try out something new - reviewing a book before it is published.

I have been acting as technical editor/reviewer (or whatever that's called in English) for the first German book about Drupal, written by Hagen Graf: "Drupal: Community-Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS". The book covers the Drupal 4.7-beta series and is a good introduction to Drupal and it's concepts. It's a nice book for people who want to learn more about creating websites with Drupal. More details in this post over at drupal.org.

Reviewing books is a lot of fun - I might do that more often in future ;)