Drupal

Yesterday, the PHP group announced the first stable release of PHP 5.5. This is great news. I shall compile it very shortly so that it can optionally be used on this server. That will allow me to test my various Drupal sites against PHP 5.5, to see if there are any issues.

However the arrival of PHP 5.5 signals the imminent end of PHP 5.3. Back in December 2012, PHP announced that

Drupal websites don't always need to allow users to register themselves with an account. This site doesn't, for instance. Anonymous commenting is turned on. The contact form is enabled for anonymous users. And those are the only thing that any member of the public would need to do - other than read. So nobody needs to set themselves up with a login.

I've used the services of Pingdom for a long time to keep track of how my websites are loading. They will check any website from ten different servers around the world, as often as once a minute. You can look at graphs of how the load time varies with time, and you can be notified as soon as the site goes down.

I've posted a couple of times before about the Mollom service I use to filter comments and e-mails from this site for potential spam.

Lately, the spam on this site has gone just crazy. Happily, Mollom has caught it all - I've not had one get through.

In case you can't see the numbers on the graph, here's how it's gone:

Regular visitors to this site will notice that the layout has changed a little.

That's all that many of you will want to know. Those of you who are technically minded, however, may wish to read on.

The site is developed with Drupal. Drupal is currently on version 7, and the first release of version 7 was on January 5th 2011. That's 15 months ago. Drupal 6 is still fully supported, and will remain so until the final release of Drupal 8 (12-18 months away - probably). There's therefore no rush to upgrade a site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.

When I first posted about my new site layout it was a brief post because I simply needed to make the announcement.

I promised more explanation for those who were interested, so here it is.