I assume that the problem is caused by Google Analytics, namely the “track outgoing clicks” feature (as recalled, might be inaccurate feature name). “Track outgoing links” adds some JavaScript code to all outgoing links, and that script has tick characters like this one ‘ which, incidentally, are also used for delimiting the values of comment anchor tags.

To fix:

1. locate file wp-includes/comment-template.php
2. in that file, find the get_comment_author_link function (lines 140-150 in WP 2.7.1)
3. replace the line
   1. $return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

   with

   1. $return = '<a href="'.$url.'" rel="external nofollow" class="url">'.$author.'</a>';

This helped me and might help you.

It appears that it is very easy to use ExpressionEngine’s contact form (which uses Email module) to send emails to arbitrary addresses – simply put, send spam using someone’s EE.

And here’s why:

• recipients hidden field is passed to the client; it is encrypted, but with access to the mod.email.php code, it is a matter of several minutes to write your own email-encoding function which will produce a completely valid recipients field
• there’s also XID field, which seems to be unique for each page load

Spamming algorithm is clear, so I won’t elaborate. (I could have missed some session variables, though – didn’t check them.)

This information is valid as of ExpressionEngine 1.6.6, but nothing in the change-logs indicates that this mechanism was modified in the newer versions of EE.

Update: I’ve tested, and this vulnerability does exist. The simplest prevention measure is to enable Captcha for Contact Form.

I’ve notified the developers.

• Setup wizard for the free JW FLV Media Player (and the JW FLV Media Player itself)
• Flash Video in Drupal 5: A complete multimedia tutorial to the flashvideo module
• actual flashvideo module page on drupal.org

And SK2 still works under WP 2.5! (SK 2.3 was released to support WP 2.1)

Kudos to Dave!

It would be a pity if this excellent plugin is abandoned and stops functioning in one of the upcoming WP releases.

Update: SpamKarma is now GPL (at google code).

Intensively working with Drupal during the past two weeks, I find it to be an excellent tool, and also much more than a YACMS.

Now I think that Drupal is also a framework – providing invisible to developer caching, session handling, access control, theming, localization, and more. The minimal effort required to extend already huge Drupal functionality is to write your own module – and, if done right, your module will immediately benefit from all the bonuses Drupal provides.

But Drupal also really shines as a CMS! You can start with a free design theme, and without any PHP knowledge have your custom portal built within a week – with your own hands, if you desire! (Note: “within a week” is true, but only if you already know what exactly you should be doing; learning time is short, but it’s not within that same week.)

What makes Drupal so powerful? I’d say that beautiful core and numerous modules.

What Drupal has to offer?

In theming, it uses by default PHPTemplate engine. It’s simple – just HTML, with PHP tags inserted where dynamic content should go. It’s logical – you have separate layout files for the whole page, for blocks, for content (nodes), etc. That won’t be an exaggeration, if I say that Drupal themes support allows 95% of designs to be easily implemented. (5% go to static xHTML and ExpressionEngine )

You also have blocks in Drupal. Blocks might be the oldest component of almost all CMSs, but the power of Drupal is that you have full CSS control over blocks. And you can also individually control the HTML of any block – using the same PHPTemplate files, as for general Drupal theming!

CCK, content construction kit, is the candidate module for the inclusion into Drupal core. It allows you to actually construct content types the way you want. If you have a custom-designed web-site with several differently displayed sections – just create new content type for each section, and add only the information needed for each section’s content items! Then show your content, using theming. Or using contemplate module – which is a “visual editor for content display themes”. That’s purely point-and-click.

Views module is another shotgun in the powerful arsenal of Drupal. It allows you to build custom pages and blocks from the content and content types you have. And not a single line of PHP or SQL has to be written*. (*: if there is a view which fits your needs.)

If you decide to dive into some more details – grab the devel module, it greatly facilitates development for Drupal.

Choose Drupal. It’s strong, flexible (to the point that someone might call it a drawback), versatile, highly extendible, secure, and much more!

Here’s what I mean:

• user levels were changed to user roles – just like in Drupal
• now, instead of categories and just recently introduced tags, the word ‘taxonomy’ is used – which is a Drupal slang
• ‘widgets’ work just like ‘blocks’ in Drupal – even style IDs are assigned the same way, e.g. id=”widget subscribe_to_comments_widget”
• (add here the similarity you found yourself)

I wonder, what will be next. PHPTemplate support, as default theming engine?
Or no-backwards-compatibility policy?
Or, best for WP users, advanced Drupal-like caching and throttling techniques?

Please comment if you know of any other good high-quality technical Drupal introductions/descriptions.

EE CMS consists of “modules”. Each module has some admin-side and/or visitor-side functionality, and adds some more template tags, available for templating.

I built a site using EE – http://j-school.kiev.ua/ (it’s in Ukrainian, but has several static pages in English). The site has a main blog, and approximately eight topical sub-blogs. Everything is driven by quite a limited number of custom templates – which are often just “include”-d with different parameters.

As a summary: EE is good for “unusual designs”, as it’s templating is both strong and flexible. However, as a programmer, I find EE “rough around the edges”, and not always consistent. It’s still being developed – for example, the “Pages” module, which allows to create pages with user-defined URLs/permalinks, was added to the core fairly recently; before that, it existed only as a third-party module, and was quite a pain to use.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way associated with EllisLab, except for being a hired programmer for a purchased EE version.

Update generally went well, except for the message I got on the main page:

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

It was quite easy to figure out that new WP conflicts with an elderly “Sideblog” plugin – so I had to deactivate that one, and will have to update all the active plugins to avoid some other less evident problems… (actually, just completed updating all the plugins… quite a time-eater, that was.)

Also, there will be a slight change to what and how I write. No other details for now – but stay tuned! All the changes with no exceptions are planned for the good of readers, and for the users’ benefits!

Stimulated by the post of Eric Daniel (who used to have a blog at termitenshort.com), I compiled the most recent ffmpeg SVN source into Linux binary, which runs fine on my shared hosting (note: I’m using older ffmpeg binaries, which are at the end of the post).

mini-FAQ:
Q: Why the title has “for Gallery2″?
A: Just because I avoided the inclusion of libraries, which were not found on my shared hosting server. I hope this will work for other shared hosting environments.

Configuration, version and date can be found in the output of ffmpeg.

Versions built on April, 8, 2008:
ffmpeg (no lame) (checked: can be executed on godaddy shared hosting)

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:13:14, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)
usage: ffmpeg [[infile options] -i infile]… {[outfile options] outfile}…

ffmpeg (with lame). For this one, grab libmp3lame.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:44:31, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Based on single request: ffmpeg (with lame and libfaac and libfaad). For this one, grab libfaac.so and libfaad.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 23:53:57, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

As an experiment, here’s ffmpeg freebsd binary without lame support. Did ran on some FreeBSD 6.3 hosting.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –target-os=freebsd
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 16:15:38, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Versions built on Ocotber, 28, 2007:
download ffmpeg without libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-pthreads

–enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 22:46:10, gcc: 3.4.6

download ffmpeg with libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-libmp3lame

–enable-pthreads –enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 23:04:59, gcc: 3.4.6

Shared hosting testing reports are welcome.

Below you can find even older versions of ffmpeg, which were tested and found functional on GoDaddy shared hosting.

Again, two versions are available – with libmp3lame support and without. Learn more about using ffmpeg with libmp3lame support in shared hosting environment.

download ffmpeg without lame

FFmpeg version SVN-r9447, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-pthreads –enable-libvorbis –disable-v4l –disable-v4l2 –disable-bktr –disable-dv1394 –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.4.1
libavcodec version: 51.40.4
libavformat version: 51.12.1
built on Jun 28 2007 12:32:29, gcc: 3.4.6

The second binary DID NOT work on my shared hosting due to the absence of libmp3lame.so.0 (see comments and this post on how to enable libmp3lame support).
It was built two days later, and has the following config:

download ffmpeg with lame

FFmpeg version SVN-r9451, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-libmp3lame –enable-pthreads –enable-libvorbis –disable-v4l –disable-v4l2 –disable-bktr –disable-dv1394 –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.4.1
libavcodec version: 51.40.4
libavformat version: 51.12.1
built on Jun 30 2007 11:51:23, gcc: 3.4.6

On-the-fly Content-Regeneration

Here’s the theoretical problem:

1. we are building a high-traffic site with lots of once-per-(hour|day) updated items
2. we have a CMS with just all the features we need, but it’s really CPU/DB-consuming and slow (does it sound familiar? )
3. there’s a need to serve static files

And here’s the ‘radical alternative’ solution:

1. install the CMS of choice
2. tweak the CMS’s output layer to both produce/write to disk (or update) static HTML files, and to dump those same pages directly to browser
3. use the “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” mod_rewrite rules set

This is it, in short. The “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” will read the static files if they exist, or will query the CMS, which will create/update the static files and output the necessary page. You can also setup a cron-job to remove all static files older than XX minutes, to force content refresh.

Below is the copy of “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” from the mod_rewrite guide.

Description:
Here comes a really esoteric feature: Dynamically generated but statically served pages, i.e. pages should be delivered as pure static pages (read from the filesystem and just passed through), but they have to be generated dynamically by the webserver if missing. This way you can have CGI-generated pages which are statically served unless one (or a cronjob) removes the static contents. Then the contents gets refreshed.
Solution:
This is done via the following ruleset:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^page\.html$ page.cgi [T=application/x-httpd-cgi,L]

Here a request to page.html leads to a internal run of a corresponding page.cgi if page.html is still missing or has filesize null. The trick here is that page.cgi is a usual CGI script which (additionally to its STDOUT) writes its output to the file page.html. Once it was run, the server sends out the data of page.html. When the webmaster wants to force a refresh the contents, he just removes page.html (usually done by a cronjob).

Then Django and Turbogears were seen as web-development frameworks akin to Zope. Search revealed an interesting anti-Zope rant at Zope vs Django. Reading until the end, and then following the comments, I came across the comment by Holger Froebe, which is a huge one (probably the longest comment I had ever seen), and represents a detailed explanation with examples of the reasons to use Zope 3. I found that comment to be a really good-written one, so if you are deciding on whether you should use Zope 3 or not, then read the comment here (scroll down or just search for “Holger Froebe”).

For convenience and in order to preserve this worhty piece of work from vanishing, below is the 99%-exact copy-paste of that comment.

i18n module
i18n: Getting the whole thing to work : http://drupal.org/node/81094
Patch: Translations of menu titles and descriptions: http://drupal.org/node/70919
Translated links: http://drupal.org/node/67814
i18n: menu not expanding with URL-Alias: http://drupal.org/node/80820

There was an alternative module to i18n, but I cannot find it at the moment.

Following the discussions, installation and administrative interface became much simpler, and thus easier for newbies. Other first-impression change is said to be the new default theme, which looks good as well.

I will surely check this new release out very soon, but for now you can try one yourself.

Update: beta-2 is available since November, 28, with over 160 bugs fixed.

Primary source of information was this post, but I recommend that you follow instructions here.

To add AdSense to your Gallery2 sidebar (when using the Matrix theme as a sample):

1. copy themes/matrix/templates/sidebar.tpl to theme/matrix/templates/local/sidebar.tpl on your server. This is needed to preserve your modifications when the Matrix theme will be upgraded.
2. any further modifications should be done in your newly copied local/sidebar.tpl file.
3. create the file which will contain all your AdSense code – e.g., let it be adsense_160x600.tpl for the Wide Scyscraper format. Put all your AdSense code into that file, and upload the file to your theme/matrix/templates/local/ folder on the server.
4. now edit the sidebar.tpl file. My original file looked like this:[smarty]
   {* Show the sidebar blocks chosen for this theme *}
   {foreach from=$theme.params.sidebarBlocks item=block}
   {g->block type=$block.0 params=$block.1 class=”gbBlock”}
   {/foreach}
   {g->block type=”core.NavigationLinks” class=”gbBlock”}

   [/smarty] I added [smarty]{if $user.isGuest == 1}
   {* adsense code *}
   {g->theme include=”adsense_160x600.tpl” class=”gbBlock”}
   {/if}[/smarty] and final file looked like this:[smarty]{*
   * $Revision: 1.2 $
   * If you want to customize this file, do not edit it directly since future upgrades
   * may overwrite it. Instead, copy it into a new directory called “local” and edit that
   * version. Gallery will look for that file first and use it if it exists.
   *}

   {* Show the sidebar blocks chosen for this theme *}
   {foreach from=$theme.params.sidebarBlocks item=block}
   {g->block type=$block.0 params=$block.1 class=”gbBlock”}
   {/foreach}
   {g->block type=”core.NavigationLinks” class=”gbBlock”}
   {if $user.isGuest == 1}
   {* adsense code *}
   {g->theme include=”adsense_160x600.tpl” class=”gbBlock”}
   {/if}

   [/smarty]

5. well, basically you are done. If you need/want to, you can wrap the inserted code into some styled container, to define the look of the block, like:[smarty]
   {if $user.isGuest == 1}
   {* adsense code *}
   {g->theme include=”adsense_160x600.tpl” class=”gbBlock”}
   {/if}

   [/smarty]

6. you can use any AdSense format you like, but you must mind the width of the sidebar in your theme – so that site layout is not broken by too wide AdSense units.

Finally, some more hints and explanations.

The smarty variables for users in Gallery2 are:

• $user.isGuest
• $user.isRegisteredUser
• $user.isAdmin

As you might have noticed, in the code above AdSense unit is shown ONLY IF the page visitor is a Guest. Thus ads will not be shown to Registered Users and Admin. I did not manage to find this condition in Google’s AdSense Policy, but the source post author states that showing Google Ads in password-protected areas is a violation of Google’s Terms Of Service (TOS). Again – I did not find that, but in good faith I provide the code which limits ads to guest-only users. If you want to show ads to any user class – just remove the first {if} and last {/if} lines from the code. Any knowledgeable comments on this (preferrably with URLs) are very welcome, as personally I see nothing bad in putting AdSense onto password-protected pages in the case of the Gallery, where photos are the main type of content.

To add multiple ad units – create a single file for each distinct ad format/type you want to use, and include it using the code shown above. Just keep in mind limitations imposed by Google on the number of ad units of different types on a single page.

Hope this helps, and good luck to you.

Now there is a Drupal 6.x module available. It is in no way related to the migrate script(s) below.

The newest script version migrates from PHP-Nuke 6.5 to Drupal 5.x.
Download the latest version of the migration script.

In 2002 I set up a PHPNuke-6.0 – based portal. Eventually it died due to the lack of time investments and support from collaborators. Now, when time came to revive the project, I made a search and decided to use Drupal as a base CMS for the portal.
In order to migrate userbase from an old portal to the new Drupal-powered one, and following the topic at drupal.org, I found a script and its modification.
I used it to migrate only users, and made some cosmetic changes:

• added options for custom phpnuke table prefixes
• default user name is now = uname (login), not ‘temp_name’, as before
• I replaced hard-coded links to ‘migrate.php’ with links to $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], so that if you rename the script you don’t have any problems with that
• now forum topics should not be promoted to the main page (changed 1 to 0 as hinted by Alexis)

Finally, I would like to thank both Karthik Kumar for the original script and Alexis Bellido for the 6.0_to_4.7 modification.

Update: Waldo updated the migration script.
Here are the changes:

• imports from (a security-patched) Nuke 6.5 -> Drupal 5.1
• imports story categories into Drupal taxonomy
• incorporates phpnuke “Contributor writes…” into story
• incorporates phpnuke admin story “note”
• imports polls (does not import record of who already voted. You can easily “close” old phpnuke polls via Admin page. I left them open.)
• imports poll comments
• imports *anonymous* comments for stories, fora, & polls
• imports anonymous forum posts
• filters BBCode to make semi-compatible with Drupal BBCode module
• uses Drupal 5.0 API, and must be run from drupal root directory (/drupal-5/, for example)

Thanks to Waldo for his work!

Latest update: Waldo sent the newest, improved version of the PHP-Nuke-2-Drupal conversion script. Here is Waldo’s description:

New Fixes:

• retain original user registration date & last visit 4/22/07
• fixed user migration bug which could result in screwed max_uid in session table 4/22/07
• store anonymous forum posts names in the log for future compatibility w/Drupal 6 7/16/07
• uses the “tidy” extension (if installed) in php 5.x to clean up the HTML of postings & stories 7/30/07
• bug fixes (possibly) related to drupal 5.2 where the fora had the wrong “changed” date resulting in misordered node lists. 7/30/07
• polls properly remember date of last comment 7/30/07

If you have the “tidy” PHP extension, it should close all open HTML tags and stuff in stories.

update: I added to the script some more debug messages in case something goes wrong (as recommended by me) – that pushed the version up to 0.03.

Also, now MySQL connection collation is set to utf8 before doing anything – this should fix the problems with non-English characters in the imported texts (especially accented/umlauted/etc characters). Thus I upped the version to 0.04. For reference and in case 0.04 doesn’t work for you, I keep the older versions as well.

Download the latest phpnuke2drupal-5.x-0.04-W.zip or the latest tar-gzipped version of the phpnuke2drupal migration script.

update: to import Reviews and WebLinks from PHPNuke to Drupal, have a look at this and this comments; you will need CCK, and might need CCK Link Field to import reviews/weblinks.

Previous (older) versions:
phpnuke2drupal-5.x-0.03-W.zip
phpnuke2drupal-5.x-0.03-W.tar.gz
phpnuke2drupal-5.x-0.02-w.zip
phpnuke2drupal-5.x-0.02-w.tar.gz
phpnuke2drupal-5.x-0.01 (VValdo’s huge improvements first appear here)
first version with my minor modifications

IMPORTANT: for migration to work you will need MySQL version to be >= 4.1.1. Earlier versions do not support the STR_TO_DATE() function, used in the migration script.

IMPORTANT: if you want to migrate forum entries from PHPNuke to Drupal, be sure to setup forum in your Drupal installation first – otherwise migration of forum entries will fail. See comments 13-17 below for user experiences.

If you do not get any help here, there is also a drupal.org migration thread. I will keep this page updated for as long as I get new information about the migration script.

If you encounter any problems during migration – just search/scan the comments, your problem might have been already solved by someone else.

If you gooogle this problem, you will get loads of forums discussing topics like ‘Mambo vs Drupal’, ‘PHP-Nuke vs PostNuke’ etc. But, to be sure, this ‘source’ of information is not likely to really help you choose. What you need is a good in-depth overview of the systems.

And I found one at IBM’s web-site. I strongly recommend reading it if you need to choose a CMS. It’s fresh (July 11, 2006), and just good. Here’s a CMS comparison table from that address (copyrights belong to respective owners):

If you’d like to, you can also read Part 2, or the whole series of articles on IBM’s web-service design process, titled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”. In the series, there are also articles describing the use of Eclipse, Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin for the collaborative web-site creation.

Update: for some reason :), IBM had taken down parts 1 and 2; now only parts three and four are available.