Aaron is a relatively famous SEM/SEO and has obviously built a lot of sites. After he migrated his main site, SEOBook.com to Drupal and then even made a optimistic prediction about the future of Drupal I was curious about Aaron's experiences and wanted to see what he had to say about the process and why he likes Drupal. He was kind enough to respond with these answers.

1. What initially motivated you to migrate seobook.com from MovableType to Drupal?

I originally used MovableType, but I wanted to create a site with premium content and permissions based access. The Drupal premium module facilitated that quite well. Plus my developer really liked Drupal and saw it as being extensible enough to do everything I wanted (integrate with our affiliate program, create a structured online training program , offer page by page control of premium or regular access, allow me to offer free snippets on some of the premium content, integrate with vBulletin forums, and integrate with the Paypal IPN).

2. What CMS (or mix of CMS) do you use as the basis for new projects?

Honestly most of my projects usually come in a couple waves. A small mini-site using flat files or server side incles, put up so I can start promoting it right away, and then as I decide to grow it out I typically switch off to Drupal or Wordpress on most sites. The really easy small and bloggy type projects get Wordpress, but Drupal is used on the more complex ones.

3. Was anything about Drupal particularly hard to get used to? Hard to migrate to? Anything particularly easy and beneficial?

Ever quarter I try to munge and analyze the download data. The data for January is now available. Views continues its reign at the top of the module list. Images and WYSIWYG remain popular. Popular themes continue to be dominated by those that start with letters at the beginning of the alphabet.

Most Popular Drupal Modules

views	8173
image	7461
cck	6704
tinymce	6317
token	5067
pathauto	3491
date	3438
devel	3322
imagefield	3254
fckeditor	3176

Most Popular Drupal Themes

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Amor_Azul 4121 zen 2565 affaires 2322 alek_2_0 2081 amadou 2063 aberdeen 1960 art4_blue 1734

The coolest thing to stick on your blog this days (since the release of Drupal6) is a series of screencast videos about Drupal6. Below are some of the videos about Drupal6 and the HTML you need to embed them into your blog. This page should make it easy for you to help spread the word about the Drupal6: Just pick your favorite video (or 3) and post them to your blog.

Note that for the first three videos they are "cc-by-sa" which requires the attribution link be to MasteringDrupal.com while the third is by Addison Berry of Lullabot.

New Features in Drupal6

Whey even bother with an upgrade? Well, the New Features in Drupal6 video should help get you excited to upgrade.

While the rest of this post looks back at 2007, I'd like to throw some attention to the security presentation at DrupalCon Boston.

2007 was a busy year for the Drupal Security Team. That's not to say that Drupal is unsafe but that security requires a lot of work. The nature of the work makes it hard to communicate exactly what is going on. So here is an attempt to share some information about the past year for the security team.

Releases, Reports, and Discussion

The team issued 37 Security Announcements (SAs), representing more than 100 patches released. Each SA requires at least 1 patch and 2 reviews (review before the patch is made to find other security holes and a second review to ensure that the hole has actually been fixed). Most issues involve multiple patches and multiple reviews. Each also requires the SA to be written and reviewed, the patches to be committed, release nodes created, published, drafts copied from security.drupal.org to drupal.org, and flipping publish/status bits on a few nodes around our infrastructure. All of that work was done 37 times last year or approximately once every 10 days. For comparison, 2006 totaled 32 SAs.

For each issue, there are more problems reported which turn out not to be issues. See Howto report a security issue and My Site Was Defaced ("hacked") What Should I do Now? for more information about how to report issues properly and with sufficient information. You can get a sense for the amount of discussion of security related topics and also of false reports based on the volume of emails to the internal mailing list:

Individual mails to the security team:

At the DrupalCon Barcelona one of the panels I lead was about (Dis)Organizing Local User Group Events. I still haven't decided what to talk about at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon but I'm sure it will be Roxxorz. I've been roped pursuaded into discussing SEO in Drupal and Userpoints. Personally, I think Prediction Markets are interesting enough to merit their own presentation (now to see about getting them ready to demo).

Now, that plug out of the way, what I really want to discuss is a problem that faces most Drupal User Groups.

Local User Group Two Hump Problem

About 2 years ago I started reaching out to folks in Denver to start the Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group (DBUG for short). From the first meeting it seemed clear: the skill levels were grouped around two distinct and competing centers:

Lots of people were still trying to figure out how to pronounce Drupal - we knew them from the second they showed up "Is this the drooo-PAWL meeting?" And then there was a nother group at the other end, the "Yeah, I just patched the form.inc so I could thrombulate the widgetizer." There were relatively few people in the middle or at either extreme.

If you liked the Drupal Digest, you've probably been sad the last few months wondering what happened. Well, Drupal Dashboard is finally here to fill in the hole that was left in your hearts when DrupalDigest.com was usurped.

What is the Drupal Dashboard

It's a simple concept: if you try to pay attention to all the sources of information coming from Drupal you will quickly die of information overload. Instead, we will have a few people paying attention to these information feeds and then summarizing them for you. For now, there is a Important CVS Commit feed and an Important Module Releases feed. If you would like to add a filtered version of something (the development mailing list? drupal.org/planet?) please contact me. You can read more information about Drupal Dashboard like how it was built in the About Drupal Dashboard page.

My favorite tag lines for the Dashboard: "All wheat, no chaff" or "Essential information for busy professionals" or "We read everything so you don't have to." Yeah. If you notice any problems with the site I'd love to hear about those too - it's an infant still. There's plenty left on the todo list not least of which is "fix all bugs."

Drupal SEO Video Tutorials (and i18n and l10n and new features)