Aaron Winborn

The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.

Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.

Optical Image Technology (OIT) and client Panhandle Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of West Virginia has been named one of three national finalists for the 2010 AIIM Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the small company category.  The award recognizes excellence in the field of enterprise content management (ECM) technology, showcasing projects that have achieved a strong return on investment.  The “best practices” designation denotes processes that are quantifiable, adaptable, and repeatable. 

One of the first insurers in the region to transition from paper to electronic files and processing, Panhandle implemented OIT’s DocFinity® document and content management software for front-end scanning and secure electronic file access.  Ultimately, Panhandle’s DocFinity integration with their web-based policy administration system, company portal, website, and more eliminated paper-based processing and enabled secure remote access for agents and customers. 

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Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

Also, CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for DrupalCon - San Francisco 2010. This is our first time we have sponsored a DrupalCon event and we're excited to be helping out by promoting this event. While you can learn quite a bit about Drupal at this conference, the conference also gives you a chance to see and hear directly from the the open source community that is supporting Drupal. As a user of Drupal, it's not just about the software that sparks our interest in DrupalCon but also the people in Drupal's community we have come to know and appreciate.

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Tiki has released updates for both current release branches: 3.5 and 4.2. Both updates include bug fixes, feature polishing, and security updates. All Tiki sites are strongly encouraged to update to the latest version to take advantage of security fixes and updates. See the download page at TikiWiki.org to determine which branch (3.x or 4.x) best suits your needs.

Coming Soon: Tiki 5

The next major release, Tiki 5, is planned for April 2010 and will include many new features including shopping cart and payment support, improved translation/multilingual support, an advanced rating and scoring system, workspaces, performance improvements, and much more. See the Tiki 5 documentation for additional information on this upcoming release. Early adopters can obtain pre-release versions of Tiki 5 directly from the SVN repository.

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All Drupal developers have experienced this nightmare. You have been creating a great project, now it’s time to deploy it. No one wants to deal with it. No one wants to be the responsible of doing it.

If you are building a simple site, and there’s only a one time deployment, it’s not a big deal. You just have to follow the largely discussed and know simple rules.

The Rules:

1. Use SVN (or CVS) to keep your code updated among the developers
2. Deploy to production by backing up/restoring the database
3. Create scripts to make the deployment process automatic

That’s all, the unique problem you could have is maybe that you will have to delete the test content/users and change some settings before going live, but in summary, it’s pretty easy.

When it’s about deploying code, it’s still easy to do if you followed the simple rules. You will have only to update your SVN branch and you are done.

When the nightmare begins?

The problem is deploying changes made in the CMS, but without wiping all the existing data. In other words, merging the database changes, the settings and content stored in the database.

Scenario 1: Big (or huge) Drupal projects

You have to deploy a project in multiple phases. So while the first phase is deployed and working in production, you have a bunch of developers working on the next phase (this means, implementing new code, creating new nodes, creating new views, editing existing ones, changing settings, users, permissions, etc.)

Read more of Cesar Salazar's take on: Enterprise Drupal: Project Configuration Management and Release Management.

MySQL, the open source database product that puts the "M" in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

The story of MySQL AB is pretty amazing, so I unleashed my "inner academic", did some research and compiled a timeline of MySQL AB's history. This timeline is assembled based on different resources online, such as MySQL press releases (example 1) and interviews with MySQL AB executives (example 2, example 3), etc.

Things to add? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.

• MySQL AB founded by Michael Widenius (Monty), David Axmark and Allan Larsson in Sweden.

• MySQL goes Open Source and releases software under the terms of the GPL. Revenues dropped 80% as a result, and it took a year to make up for it.

• Mårten Mickos elected CEO at age 38. Mårten was the CEO of a number of Nordic companies before joining MySQL, and comes with a sales and marketing background.
• 2 million active installations.
• Raised series A with undisclosed amount from Scandinavian venture capitalists. Estimated to be around $1 to $2 million.

• MySQL launched US headquarters in addition to Swedish headquarters.
• 3 million active users.
• Ended the year with $6.5 million in revenue with 1,000 paying customers.

• Raised a $19.5 million series B from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.
• 4 million active installations and over 30,000 downloads per day.
• Ended the year with $12 million in revenue.

• With the main revenue coming from the OEM dual-licensing model, MySQL decides to move more into the enterprise market and to focus more on recurring revenue from end users rather than one-time licensing fees from their OEM partners.
• Ended the year with $20 million in revenue.

• MySQL launched the MySQL Network modeled after the RedHat Network. The MySQL Network is a subscription service targeted at end users that provides updates, alerts, notifications, and product-level support designed to make it easier for companies to manage hundreds of MySQL servers.
• MySQL 5 ships and includes many new features to go after enterprise users (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, views, cursors, distributed transactions, federated storage engines, etc.)
• Oracle buys Innobase, the 4-person Finnish company behind MySQL's InnoDB storage backend.
• Ended the year with $34 million in revenue based on 3400 customers.

• Mårten Mickos confirms that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Oracle' CEO Larry Ellison commented: "We've spoken to them, in fact we've spoken to almost everyone. Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion."
• Oracle buys Sleepycat, the company that provides MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine.
• Mårten Mickos announces that they are making MySQL ready for an IPO in 2008 on an projected $100 million in revenues.
• 8 million active installations.
• MySQL has 320 employees in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home.
• Raised a $18 million Series C based on a rumored valuation north of $300 million.
• MySQL is estimated to have a 33% market share measured in install base and 0.2% market share measured in revenue (the database market was a $15 billion market in 2006).
• Ended the year with $50 million in revenue.

• Ended the year with $75 million in revenue.

• Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion.
• Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, two of MySQL AB's co-founders, begin to criticize Sun publicly and leave Sun shortly after.

• Mårten Mickos leaves Sun and becomes entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Sun has now lost the business and spiritual leaders that turned MySQL into a success.
• Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

If you've got Drush installed—and you really should—you can use the following recipe to setup a backup system that will maintain daily backups for the last two weeks. Most of the logrotate configuration is based on a Wikibooks book that I found.

Make sure logrotate is installed:
whereis logrotate

Which should print something like:
logrotate: /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf /etc/logrotate.d /usr/share/man/man8/logrotate.8.gz

So for this site we'll use the full path /usr/sbin/logrotate to run the program.

If you don't know where drush is installed you'll probably want to repeat the process to determine its location. The site I'm working on right now is hosted by May First, a very Drupal friendly ISP (and an amazing progressive group), so they've installed drush at /usr/bin/drush.

drush needs to be able to find the correct settings.php file to connect to your database. Specify the root of your Drupal site using the -r switch. You can test that it's able to locate your settings using the following command:
/usr/bin/drush -r ~/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/web sql conf

If it works you'll see an array with your database connection information.

Create the state and configuration files:
touch ~/.logrotate.state ~/.logrotate.config

Edit ~/.logrotate.config insert the following text:
~/backup/dev.sql.gz {
        rotate 7
        daily
        nocompress
        nocopytruncate
        postrotate
          /usr/bin/drush -r ~/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/web/ sql dump | gzip > ~/backup/dev.sql.gz
        endscript
}

logrotate expects that the file will already exist so we need to use drush to create the first one:
/usr/bin/drush -r ~/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/web/ sql dump | gzip > ~/backup/dev.sql.gz

Test that logrotate will work correctly:
/usr/sbin/logrotate --state=~/.logrotate.state ~/.logrotate.config --debug

If everything is working correctly you'll see something like:
reading config file /home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/.logrotate.config
reading config info for "/home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/backup/dev.sql.gz"

Handling 1 logs

rotating pattern: "/home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/backup/dev.sql.gz"  after 1 days (7 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/backup/dev.sql.gz
  log does not need rotating

Edit your crontab:
crontab -e

And add the following line which will run logrotate at midnight:
0 0 * * *       /usr/sbin/logrotate --state=~/.logrotate.state ~/.logrotate.config

That's it, you should now have two weeks of daily backups. You'll want to check back on it tomorrow and make sure that the backups are actually occurring and that the old ones are being renamed to .sql.gz.1, .sql.gz.2, etc.

Elgg 1.7 was released this week. Elgg is an open source social platform and is made for individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment. This new version of Elgg introduces some new features but much of the development time was spent improving the core API to make Elgg a stable platform for future development.

Some of the significant changes in Elgg 1.7 include:

• Proper UTF8 support in the database -- This allows developers to use MySQL's native string functions in queries
• A new data directories layout to work with standard filesystems
• Full-text search
• A new core API for retrieving entities
• A functional REST API
• Unit tests

Elgg 1.7 is available at Elgg.org on their downloads page.

Packt is pleased to announce Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide, a new book that helps PHP developers build applications that interface with the customer, product, and order data using Magento's Core API. Written by Jamie Huskisson, this book is packed with examples for effective Magento development.

Magento is an Open Source, e-commerce web application that was created by Varien, and built on components of the Zend Framework. Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software and has gained popularity in a short period of time. Users can control the look, content and functionality of their e-commerce web site with the help of Magento’s powerful theming engine.

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide will help developers extend and customize the Magento e-commerce system using PHP code. They will get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento and learn about the best modules available. Developers can then build a shipping module for their Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them.

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For 40 years, scientists have searched for a way to bring nuclear fusion to the masses. If successful in bringing fusion online, we all could have an inexhaustible form of power to meet our world's energy needs. The promise of fusion is a dream that many have hoped to see become a reality in their lifetime.

Perhaps not for as noble of cause, Drupal users have sought better themes for their Drupal sites. Four years ago, it seemed to me that creating a good theme for Drupal was almost done as an afterthought. There simply were not too many places for a user to go for a quality Drupal theme. I recall spending a lot of wasted time maintaining my own (boring) themes for Drupal sites. The Drupal days of version 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and even 4.7 for themes were dark days indeed. Luckily, Drupal 5 introduced us to a new theme called Garland. Garland may not have been a perfect theme but in my opinion the theme marked the beginning of an era for a new style of Drupal themes.

In the past few years, the number of Drupal themes provided under open source or via private companies have exploded. Along with that explosion, various starter and base themes have been introduced too. On the top of my head I can think of Zen, Genesis, Basic, and AdaptiveTheme. These starter/base themes offer theme developers opportunities for everyone to build or use professional sub-themes. In fact, this site used Zen in the theme's early years and today we're currently using a Genesis based theme called Extreme Updates (slightly modified). With each passing year, the theme offerings for Drupal has steadily improved in quality and quantity. This year is no exception and brings us a new official base theme to carry us over into the next generation of themes made for Drupal.

The year 2010 brings us Drupal's newest base theme, Fusion.  Currently, there probably isn't a Drupal theme that offers site owners more control over layout and style than a Fusion based theme. Fusion has the support and backing of well-known Drupal theme shop, TopNotchThemes. TopNotchThemes appear to be serious enough about Fusion revolutionizing the way themes are done in Drupal. This week they publicly announced their new line of themes and a website called Fusion Drupal Themes. Most of the themes offered at the site are for a price, but there are a couple free themes also being offered that should give you a chance to see what Fusion is all about.

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David Akermanis pinged me yesterday on Twitter ("Twatted me" just sounds so wrong) stating that it has been a full year since my last blog post. And it's true it's that old, March 3rd, 2009 was the last time this website got some new content. It has been a crazy busy year, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to make a one year no-blog-post anniversary blog post to bring it back up to speed. The majority of this will be old news, but it's here just to make sure we're all on track...

• DrupalCon DC was so much fun, I posted the pictures on Flickr
• The proposal to turn Drupal into a Distributed Micro-Blog went through with the Knight Foundation and we're currently going through documentation and reports to make sure it goes through nicely
• Helped put together a new site for my good friend, David Akermanis. The aim was to be a social networking hub for his latest events, pictures, music, and his thoughts on life. Been about a year since then, so it desperately needs a new design!
• The Open Video Conference in June was crazy fun. Guest star appearance of Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde! Video interview here.
• Created yet another Drupal module: Konami Code
• Got a new Nikon D90 and absolutely been loving the pictures its taking
• Paula Valstein plays a wicked show, as did Ingrid Michaelson (here's The Chain) and Joshua Radin (here's Everything'll Be Alright). Oh, and Nick Warren, Ronski Speed, Ferry Corsten, should I go on?
• DrupalCon Paris was absolutely amazing. Paris is an incredible city, and I guiltily regret not exploring more of it instead of going to the DrupalCon sessions. Definitely going to have to visit France again.
• The New York Anime Festival was a blast. I have to get on top of uploading pictures from events. Watched Cowboy Bebop and liked this scene from episode 18 the most.
• Some of the modules I maintain are now Drupal 7 ready: String Overrides, Disqus, Mobile Theme, OpenID URL, etc.
• I'm now a Drupal Engineer at Acquia! My projects so far include keeping some of their internal workings on track, being a bridge between the marketing team and the engineering team, and helping out as much as I can in other areas. It has been absolutely fantastic so far, and I'm so happy to be part of such an incredible team.

Moving forward, I plan to post more rapidly on here. Although I'll be writing less content on each post, I will be posting more frequently. There's normal blogging (essay-ish) and then there's micro-blogging (140 characters), I think I'll turn this into something in between... A Miniblog?

In closing, I'd like to thank you everyone! It has been an amazing no-blog-post year. A very busy, productive and fun year. I hope to see you all soon!

Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX) (TSX: OTC) announced on February 22, 2010 they have entered into an agreement to buy Canadian neighbor Nstein Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: EIN).  This brings the total WCM acquisitions for Open Text to 5 (FIVE) over the past several years.  While I am sure Open Text has a solid strategy in mind for their shareholders we have concerns about the underlying roadmap for these products and the potential impact on existing customers of the now acquired WCM frameworks. 

Continue Reading Travis Cole's (COO of Oshyn, Inc) thoughts on "Open Text WCM/CMS Aquisition Roadmap"

ALEXANDRIA , VA. - Bitrix, Inc. ( www.bitrixsoft.com ), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the release of Bitrix® Site Manager ASP.NET 4.6 a multi-featured website management solution for the .NET platform now reinforced with an advanced security framework, social networking features and a number of additional enhancements to provide customers cost-effective online tools that compel Internet users to action.

Security Uppermost

"Security is the cornerstone of each and every web project. There is no need for great features if the website can be easily hacked, exposing valuable digital assets and damaging an established image," said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc. "The new version of Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET combines powerful functionality and integrated proactive protection, shielding websites against malicious programs and hacker attacks."

The new security framework provides proactive protection against the majority of known web attacks and security flaws like XSS and SQL injections and phishing. The framework recognizes threats among incoming requests, blocks website intrusions and maintains a comprehensive log about suspicious and dangerous activity being registered, providing an opportunity to respond accordingly.

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Every other week or so, someone asks me the following question: How are Mollom CAPTCHAs better than those created by CAPTCHA module?. This is an important question, and understanding it is central to understanding our philosophy with Mollom.

First, when using Mollom in "text analysis" mode, a CAPTCHA is only displayed when Mollom is uncertain about whether a message could be spam. Mollom analyzes the text of comments and combines that analysis with what it knows about the internal reputation of the posters, to determine whether a message is "spammy". Non-spam submissions are accepted without a CAPTCHA, and posts that are certainly spam are rejected automatically. By only presenting a CAPTCHA when necessary, we avoid penalizing normal (non-spamming) users with CAPTCHA challenges. The CAPTCHA module is different in that it does not perform text analysis and therefore must always display a CAPTCHA challenge.

Second, the Mollom module for Drupal has a "CAPTCHA only" mode, which is useful when clients would prefer not to use text analysis, or for when the forms have almost no text to analyze (like Drupal's user registration form). In "CAPTCHA only" mode, the user experience of the Mollom module is very similar to that of the CAPTCHA module -- the user is always prompted to complete a CAPTCHA in order to perform a certain operation. The similarity ends here, however. While the user experience is the same, the actual CAPTCHA generation is not. Mollom CAPTCHAs are "intelligent", in the sense that Mollom tracks the behavior and reputation of IP addresses from all sites using Mollom. A known spammer, operating from a known IP with a poor reputation, won't be able to complete a Mollom CAPTCHA no matter how hard he tries. And, as more users install Mollom, its performance increases as it learns from the additional data. A stand-alone module like CAPTCHA doesn't learn from user behavior, as it simply generates CAPTCHAs without regard to their context and delivery.

This second difference between the Mollom and other CAPTCHA modules is, in fact, huge. When we analyze our server logs, we see that 20% of all correctly completed CAPTCHAs are submitted by known spammers. Spammers don't seem to solve CAPTCHAs algorithmically; instead, they persuade humans to solve CAPTCHAs for them by using botnet infected machines. Two blog posts that detail this process are How to defeat Koobface and Breaking Koobface's CAPTCHA solving process. As spammers evolve and their arsenal of tools become increasingly powerful, CAPTCHA solutions must keep up to remain effective. We believe Mollom's "intelligent CAPTCHA" processing represents a significant benefit from traditional CAPTCHA generation and is one way we'll continue to stay a step ahead in our goal to eliminate posting spam.

Different protection modes in the Drupal module for Mollom.

In a couple of weeks, I'll participate in a panel discussion on The Future of Open Source in Business. In preparation for that discussion, I figured I'd write down my current thoughts and solicit some feedback. I'll talk about two important trends relevant for the future of Open Source, but there are certainly more.

First, Open Source adoption in the enterprise is trending at an incredible rate -- Drupal adoption has grown a lot in 2009 but we saw by far the biggest relative growth in the enterprise. Fueling this movement is the notion that Open Source options present an innovative, economically friendly and more secure alternative to their costly proprietary counterparts. Second, Cloud Computing is a transformational movement in that it enables continual innovation and updating - not to mention a highly expandable infrastructure that will reduce the burden on your IT team.

Two years ago, when starting Acquia, we predicted this would happen so it is no surprise that Acquia's strategy is closely aligned with those two trends: Drupal Gardens, Acquia Hosting and Acquia Search are all built on Open Source tools and delivered as Software as a Service in the cloud. Combining Open Source tools and Cloud Computing makes for the perfect storm for success. It provides real value to end-users and it enables companies to monetize Open Source. It creates a win-win situation.

At the same time, I think we have an opportunity to go beyond that, and to redefine the Software as a Service model based on Open Source values, almost exactly like we started doing 10+ years ago with off-the-shelf software. Almost all Software as a Service providers employ a proprietary model -- they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.

There is room for Open Source companies to disrupt this model, and it is probably not something that can be done without the help of Open Source companies. Drupal Gardens provides a good example of this model.

For example, users of Drupal Gardens can help improve Drupal Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.

It is Software as a Service done right -- it will offer enterprises a much more secure and low-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts and provides many Open Source projects the opportunity to have a much bigger reach. It creates a triple win scenario -- for the customer, for the Open Source project and the Open Source company -- in a way that wasn't really apparent five years ago. At least not to me.

Have you taken the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey yet? If not, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on where you think Open Source is headed.

While Flash CMS is probably the best way to create a fancy, multi-functional website, there is always a chance to improve the user experience in website management. With exactly this purpose in mind FlashMint has released Mint Editor – a new offline content management software to edit and customize FlashMint XML templates at ease.

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The XOOPS Projects has released Alpha 2 of its upcoming XOOPS 2.5.0 release.

This new release a major redesign of the Administration module which has been AJAX-ed with jQuery. Some of the new features are breaking a new ground for XOOPS, like the visual placement of blocks, and we're sure that the users will love them. The 2.5.0 release will be definitely the most innovative XOOPS  release in years.

Some of the major improvements/additions include new Help System for Admin and modules, MySQL Dump function, Tables Maintenance and Cache Clean-up in Maintenance, new Redirect messaging system, and Column sorting in tables. 

The focus on improved usability resulted in more visual administration using drag & drop, among them module ordering and block placement, and direct access to files for editing and folder management via a new File Manager. 

The developers also did a lot of code refactoring to use the latest XOOPS API. 

You can see a video with overview of the main new features on YouTube 

For more info and download links, please visit XOOPS Site

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Real Group Story: "The goal in implementing content technologies and related processes is really to apply management principles to content. Unfortunately, "management" too frequently gets conflated with "control." This is a common thread through many definitions of ECM in particular: "controlling unstructured information." Yet, management is much more than control. Good management also features enablement and empowerment. Management implies rules, but also supports creativity -- often in different amounts in different contexts."

Complete Story

There is a definite part of me that is a bit of a policy wonk. This part is diametrically opposed to the part of me that despises needless bureaucracy. However, I just want to point out a little observation regarding recent events.

Haiti had no policies in place to guard against earthquakes. If they did, they went largely unobserved.

Chile has been drilling earthquake preparedness into the public sphere for 40+ years. This morning they were hit with an earthquake roughly 1000 times the strength of the one that hit Haiti.

Estimated dead in Haiti: in excess of 230,000.
Estimated dead in Chile: currently around 120.

I don't really think that the two situations are directly comparable. Economics, culture, government, etc all play parts in how things unfold, however, I do think it is worth noting these results are due almost solely to government public policy.

Obviously, I don't think that the government is the solution to everything or even most thing. And please, don't think I am in any way suggesting or placing blame for either of these disasters at anyone's feet. However, anyone who tells me that public policy isn't effective can go suck an egg.

Have you ever had the need to produce a web site that needed dynamic CMS features and capabilities but felt that using one of the usual suspects (Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc.) was the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?

That's certainly the feeling I had when finally getting around to refactoring a small site of mine that has been on the Internet since 1997.  There had been numerous updates and tweaks made to the site over the years, but it was still based on static html pages and a bunch of customized (and poorly organized) javascripts.  Adding or modifying content was a manual process.

I had almost talked myself into using Wordpress....

Read the remainder of this article.