IT / Data Center Sanity Check

[DraconianOne]

Wordpress 3.x is much more of a CMS than it was before because of the ease of creation of custom record types - but it's still lacking a good UI for adding those without doing any coding. I haven't investigated any plugins that might do the job as I do prefer to add them myself.

I've yet to build any larger sites but I'd be tempted to use ExpressionEngine (at a cost!) which I am told does do better with an increased number of pages. 

I fucking loathe Drupal and Joomla.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, Wordpress does seem to have security issues, though I'm not at all savvy as to the particulars. But any blog or website that has a fairly decent amount of traffic inside of an institutional site is a target for endless hammering by spammers trying to insert links one way or the other. We had one hacker manage to create an admin-level account on a very early install of Wordpress and he proceeded to stick 10,000 invisible links to Russian poker and porn sites all over the blog he got into. That was a pain to clean up. You at least have to teach users how to clean up spam, require them to have a blacklist plug-in, and I would set a default closure in comments of a month or less for all users. One person not paying attention as an author/admin is going to create a serious organization-level issue eventually.

[Salamok]

Expression Engine is on our short list, having no easy way to test it combined with the known conflicts with Code Igniter and a few other missing features (no built in LDAP support) have us on the fence though.

[fuser]

Where are you putting your File Storage ?  How much are we talking ?

Moving to ~ 4TB, mirrored NAS(one local one in datacenter). Problem is it doesn't resolve the issues of off-line storage, it just helps with our end user speeds. Windows off-line storage on folders works but it causes some issues with file conflicts that users never resolve. A dropbox client has way better features of LAN syncs without involving the deployment of something like branchcache requires(windows server 2008 r2 + enterprise versions of windows 7). Novell was way ahead of the curve with its iFolder.

[Sand]

So is Drupal a language? Like HTML?

One of the non-profits I am involved in is having their website done in Drupal. WTF does this mean?

[Trippy]

No Drupal is a CMS. It's written in PHP but for normal work you just use their admin interface for creating pages, posts, etc.

[Sand]

Thanks Trippy!

Any sites on the net you are familiar with and recommend reading to get a basic understanding of?
Something I could also point the staff to?

[Trippy]

There are a bunch of books on Drupal but I haven't read any of them. I just used the main site docs and the source code itself to figure out what was going on:

http://drupal.org/

[Chimpy]

Oh, so since we were talking about it in this thread. We got an email from google saying that google apps for business was changing on May 10th to only have 10 free accounts. Anyone who has an existing account (and maybe ones made before May 10?) get to keep the number of free accounts they were allowed at creation (50 I think it was) before having to pay.

If you were thinking of migrating in the not too distant future, you might want to at least set up the account and not do the full migration now to get as many free users as possible just in case.

[Ironwood]

Free accounts ?

I'm testing Google Apps for Business right now and I don't get shit for free, except 30 days.  Where am I missing this ?  (the UK probably !)

[Numtini]

We need indefinite email retention, so the free accounts weren't useful to us. But I believe you used to be able to go up to 50 accounts, on your own domain, for free.

[Chimpy]

We need indefinite email retention, so the free accounts weren't useful to us. But I believe you used to be able to go up to 50 accounts, on your own domain, for free.

This.

You may not have been able to use any of the other apps but mail and chat with the free stuff, we only use the mail because running an exchange server for 7 employees was downright ridiculous.

[Sky]

Library's google apps account is free.

[fuser]

Free accounts ?

I'm testing Google Apps for Business right now and I don't get shit for free, except 30 days.  Where am I missing this ?  (the UK probably !)

Chimpy is refering to Google Apps by itself the free version allowed upto 50 users then you had to flip to a business account. There was no licensing TOS distinction that made businesses purchase the business version. You have limits in other aspects for the "free" account: SSO, Ads, user restrictions, 7.5GB of storage, etc. It was a loophole quite a few SMB used to operate. Most if not all are being grandfathered in but new "free" app accounts are now restricted to 10users.

edit: Here's a copy of the email

Hello,

We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.

As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for [redacted] at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

[Ironwood]

Thank you, that clarifies things.

[Mosesandstick]

If I want to check this out for a start-up I should register before the 10th of May?

[fuser]

If I want to check this out for a start-up I should register before the 10th of May?

Yep, but honestly you want the paid version if you go forward with it.