Last weekend, I switched the website from Plone to Drupal.  I know some people are contemplating this switch, so I thought I'd write about my experience so far.

In a previous entry, I proposed a fairly simple way to moderate comments.  But it was really just a way to get at a checkbox interface to delete comments.  I didn't like that spam comments were live until I deleted them.  I've come up with a better way where comments aren't shown until I approve them.  Here's how.

I didn't like that CoreBlog2 Categories were in chronological order by default.  If you viewed a category, the first thing you saw was an entry that was years old.  Here's how to change the CoreBlog2 Category view to reverse chronological:

Go into the ZMI.  Navigate to portal_skins > CoreBlog2 > cbcategory_view.  Click the "customize" button.  In your custom view, find this:
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Update - May 2, 2006:  I would skip this advice and refer to my later entry that shows how to set up fully moderated comments for COREBlog.

Because of the proliferation of comment spam on weblogs, having the ability to easily remove comments is critical.  Coreblog2, the Plone product I use for my Weblog, doesn't offer a good way to handle comment spam.  Here's how I solved the problem for myself.

To set up Plone, I wanted to make sure that I could continue to use other web applications, such as PHP and Java applications.  This can be accomplished using Apache with mod_proxy and mod_rewrite.  I'll cover this from an Ubuntu perspective, but setting this up on other distributions or operating systems should be similar.  While Ubuntu spreads the configuration to many different files, on many other systems you can put all the configuration lines I mention below directly into http.conf.