I just posted this to my drupal site and thought someone might be interested in this particular way of using RSS to push content from one drupal site to another:

"One of the advantages of RSS is that you can pull content. But with Drupal's taxonomy_dhtml and syndication add-on modules, it's possible to push it the other way.

So that Terra and I can do some collaborative writing, I setup a new taxonomy on my Drupal site called friends (remember to select "types" and set to "multiple select") with a term "Terra." I then posted a blog test with "Terra" selected.

Next, I did the same on Terra's site, except I made a friends term "Charlie" and posted a test blog .

The trick is to then configure RSS. Using the advanced syndication features, I created a news feed on Terra's site which pulls from category term "Terra" on my site and one on mine which pulls from "Charlie" on hers, both with terms "myfriends."

Next, create bundles on each for my friends. Install the block for each bundle. Now, when Terra or I want to share a blog or story post, we merely tag it from our friends category and it shows up as a link on the front page on the other's site once RSS is updated.

I published an article in Library Journal on Knowledge Logging and News Feed aggregation that mentions Drupal a few times.

K-Logging: Supporting KM with Web Logs.

htmlArea is a WYSIWYG editor to replace textareas. If you want to see it working, add a comment to this blog. You need to use MS IE 5.5 or above on Windows with JavaScript enabled, but that's a small price. (A future version will support Mozilla 1.3 on any platform.)

It was very simple to do. Details of what I did are explained in the blog entry.

Newer update: MSSQL is alive again

Update: with Drupal 4.4, MSSQL is not supported because we have no maintainer for this piece of the application. If you wish to update the database.mssql schema and get MSSQL working again, please send a note to the drupal-devel mail list.

The CVS version of Drupal has recently been enhanced such that Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) database joins MySQL and Postgres as a compatible database server.

Microsoft SQL Server is a very capable, reliable, and popular database platform. These recent Drupal enhancements welcome many more potential users - especially corporate/enterprise users. Windows-centric organizations may now run Drupal on IIS and SQL Server if they wish.

Installation instructions are in the Handbook.
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At this point, MSSQL compatibility is lightly tested. Please do post bug reports in the Bug Tracker. Also, modules in the Contrib repository will often fail on MSSQL.

I am currently evaluating software for use as a part of website for parents and children engaged in home-schooling via a charter school. Right now I'm a "Drupal outsider" so I have a few questions about whether Drupal is appropriate to the task at hand.

Here's a list of features I'm looking for in a CMS to drive the site:

1 - News posting and commenting facility
2 - Discussion forums
3 - UI flexibility
4 - Active developer and user communities
5 - Flexible authentication (probably will need LDAP support)
6 - Resource ranking system
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The last item bears a bit of explanation. One of the primary functions of the website is to give parents and students the ability to post, review, rank and search for curriculum resources online. These resources will need to be categorized by both general type (college course, textbook, parent-led group, etc.) and by age appropriateness.

The goals of the site are as follows:

1 - Allow members to post, review, rank and search for curriculum resources

2 - Provide a forum where parents and students can share news, ideas and experiences

3 - Provide mostly static content about the charter school

The site is NOT intended to facilitate any web-based course delivery like Blackboard or WebCT or any other equivalent product.

Hugo Espuny has been working hard to prepare the Drupal 4.1.0 Debian package which is now part of Debian's unstable distribution (sid) from where, hopefully, it will bubble up to the stable distribution (woody).