James Colin's BLOG MONEY WIKI

It's been a hell of a time getting Drigg for Drupal 6 out the door, but this afternoon Tony Mobily has released this long-delayed update to this Digg-like module for Drupal. Eleven months after the first Drigg for Drupal 5 release and nine months after Drupal 6.0 was released, yes, it's finally here!

You can see all Drigg releases on this page.

There has been much discussion as to when Drigg was going to be available for Drupal 6 as you can read on Drigg module's issues on Drupal.org and also on Drigg's own forum.

If you want to install Drigg, you'll need to install Drupal 6 first and also a few other modules, click here to get the complete steps.

Drigg's support for Drupal 6 means we get all the new features of Drupal 6 and in particular its improved cache system, because server ressources has always been an issue for Drigg when your site starts to become very successful (several thousand unique visitors per day) and maintaining a Drigg site always meant be careful about the amount of fancy Drupal modules you want to add to the original setup. In any case, enabling cache is not an option, it is mandatory, but with Drupal 6 and its cache system improvements it means your Drigg site can now show the real advantages of supporting the Best Open Source PHP CMS!

I'd like to make a few suggestions to new Drigg users as to what Drupal modules you should consider to improve your Drigg site experience, first let's have a look at the mandatory modules on which any Drigg site relies:

• Drigg - Obviously...
• Voting API - A powerful set of functions used by Drigg in order to allow voting.
• Extra Voting Forms - Provides Javascript-enabled voting buttons which use the powerful Voting API.
• User Karma - Provides a subsystem to assign karma to users according to their activity.

Now, in order of preference, here are several Drupal modules which are, to me, very useful in Drigg site:

1. Drupal Administration Menu - Renders a menu tree for administrative purposes as dropdown menu at the top of the window. It is so useful that I think it should be MANDATORY! Also see Navigate as an alternative administrative tool for Drupal.
2. Tagadelic - Makes weighted tag clouds from your taxonomy terms. Also see Cumulus, a module dependent on Tagadelic, that will display your site's tags using Flash that rotates them beautifully in 3D. It works like a regular tag cloud, but is more visually exciting.
3. CAPTCHA - A challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human. That will take care of automated spam.
4. Inactive User - Automatically manages inactive user accounts. Helps keep users coming back to your site by reminding them when they've been away for a configurable period of time, and cleans up unused accounts.
5. Account Reminder - Allows to resend the welcome email to those users who have yet to validate their email addresses. The admin can control the initial time before sending a reminder, the time period between subsequent reminders and the total number of reminders to send. The email that is sent is also fully customizable.
6. Comment Mail - Allows an email to be sent to the site administrator(s) when new comments are posted. A link in the email allows quick approval, editing, deletion, and/or banning of the poster's IP address.
7. Watcher - Allows your site's registered users to easily watch nodes for new comments.
8. Comment Notify - Similar to Watcher but for anonymous users.
9. Page Title - Gives you control over the page title. It is really useful for SEO only if Token module is also enabled.
10. Custom Breadcrumbs - Allows administrators to set up parameterized breadcrumb trails for any node type. It is really useful for SEO only if Token module is also enabled.
11. XML Sitemap - Creates an XML site map in accordance with the sitemaps.org specification. Useful in SEO for making sure search engines will be able to find and index all your site's user submitted content.
12. Avatar Selection - Manages configuration of a default list of avatar icons that a user can use instead of uploading a picture.

Thank you to Tony Mobily for all your hard work!