Having relevant content (in the form of high quality comments) added to your webpages on a regular basis, without having to manually create it, is a great advantage over competitors who don't implement commenting features and don't turn their sites into a hive of content producing activity.

Even on a decent CMS platform like WordPress or Drupal, administering comments can be a bit of a pain. More than likely, while you're starting out, most of the comments you receive will be spammy garbage that can't be published to the site.

I was deeply touched by the honesty of one of my readers, Jason, when he emailed in from South Korea offering to pay the full amount for one of my books (Drupal 7), he had downloaded for free.

Take a look at his email:

Having a flexible, powerful and reliable web platform is one of the most important aspects to any new Internet based endeavor. The Internet is teeming with super easy to use online blog or website builders that can get a reasonable looking, basic site or blog up in a matter of minutes. We've certainly come a long way in the last 10 years in this regard.

However, with simplicity and ease-of-use, there is always a trade off. What you make up in simplicity you often lose in flexibility and power. A good example of this is hosted WordPress sites. WordPress is a fantastic web platform for bloggers, and the hosted version (http://www.wordpress.com) allows anyone to run their own blog without having to worry about hosting and server issues.

Joomla is almost perenially more popular than Drupal in terms of attracting more traffic to its landing page. This is a bit odd considering that Drupal regularly wins CMS of the year as voted for by the public.

While both CMS platforms have pros and cons, I personally believe that Drupal is far more full-featured and powerful. With power comes increased complexity, and this is where Joomla starts to win. That and the fact that Joomla has a far slicker, more inclusive kind of vibe.

In addition to the enhanced Drupal API search features, the Drupal toolbar also received two new services links:

1. SEO, social media & marketing analysis service for websites
2. User interface and user experience analysis service for websites

In addition, Drupal community toolbar users are entitield to 10% off the price of these services. The discount voucher quote is available from within the News and announcements section of the toolbar.

It can be quite tricky to find exactly the right hosting service. It's important to find one that suits you and the requirements of your website. There are plenty of good services out there, but unfortunately, there are even more poor ones. Separating the wheat from the chaff is something everyone has to do on their first time around. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to increase the chances of finding the right hosting service.

Here's a list of things you need in order to run a website:

While Drupal is, on aggregate, one of the best web platforms around, there's always room for improvement. Drupal 6 has one fairly important failing when it comes to files and file handling. During site configuration you are required to decide whether or not files are downloadable directly by the public or whether Drupal should maintain control of the downloads. This is/was a fairly inflexible system and one that led to further problems down the line...

At some stage almost everyone running a website based on Drupal will find that they want to add a view somewhere on the site where it can't easily be done. Most often, views can be added to blocks to accompany content types or pages and the block visibility rules can be used to tweak who gets to see the view and when. Views can easily be added to panel pages, and most have their own dedicated page anyway. Despite all this, you might still need to know how to add a view manually...

Being able to accurately control the size and dimensions of images is vital for any modern website. Nowdays, different media types are commonplace because broadband has become ubiquitous. Because of this, websites have the opportunity to show off far superior and more interesting pages to the average visitor. But being able to handle images on the fly is not something that is necessarily too easy to do - unless you have a well designed web platform.

Standard drupal content types can be quite flexible. It's easy to add new fields of various kinds ranging from integers, urls and text, to node references and user references. Fundamentally though, there comes a point where a given page needs more than a single piece of content - no matter how spiffy said content is.

Look at any content driven site such as news or article websites and, almost without exception, they'll have regions showing different bits of content on their landing page. It's easy to mimic this with your own Drupal website, no programming required - all you need is the Panels module.