The open source content management platform Drupal is powerful enough off the shelf, but the ease with which you can add extra modules and the flexibility that capability offers make it even more powerful.

Administering CentOS 6 from the command line is not always intuitive and easy, especially when it comes to complex commands with hard-to-remember arguments and strict syntax. Many CentOS servers lack an X Window System graphical interface, which supports applications that could ease administration tasks. They can, however, run text-based user interfaces (TUI), which are often in the form of wizards, and which provide options for navigation, accept text input, and show progress bars.

Managing Linux software installation is usually a simple process thanks to packaging tools such as yum and APT. Building packages, however, is a whole different story. FPM (Effing Package Management - don't blame us, we didn't name it) is a simpler alternative. You can use FPM to build RPM and DEB packages and then create a repository for easy distribution across your systems.

In the first article in this two-part series we built a simple web form and showed how to get and display an RSS feed by using jQuery, AJAX, and a PHP proxy. In this second part, we'll solve the same problem in different ways, by using APIs provided by Google and Yahoo!

Oscar Wilde once said, "It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information." Given the number of RSS feeds now available, it appears things may have changed since his time. Nevertheless, you might want to get, process, and display information from an RSS feed on your site. For just showing a feed, a simple news aggregator is enough, but getting a feed directly from a web page is a thornier problem. In this article we will examine ways to fetch and process a news feed from a web page using AJAX to get the data, and see different ways of processing the resulting XML or JSON code. (If all these abbreviations make you nervous, see Jargon Untangled.)

In a web browser, a bookmark allows users to get back to a given web page at any time. Users can share bookmarkable pages with other users by just sharing a page URL (with its required parameters). Bookmarkable pages are also friends to search engines because they can be indexed by search crawlers. Sometimes you might want to create a bookmarkable page programmatically, with Java for instance. Here's how to create bookmarkable pages in Java EE applications using the JavaServer Faces (JSF) framework.

MySQL is a ubiquitous database in the enterprise. Many administrators communicate with the software by using mysql on the command line, issuing SQL statements via a straightforward console text interface. That works just fine, but a textual interface definitely has usability drawbacks. Others, who prefer a graphical user interface, turn to phpMyAdmin, about which we've written recently. If you prefer a GUI, you might consider another friendly SQL editor. MySQL Workbench enables you to configure and administer your MySQL servers, view and edit your existing databases, and create new databases from an enhanced entity-relationship (ERR) data model, which you can create inside Workbench. If you're not really a database person by trade, but wind up having to manage them from time to time, Workbench can make your life easier.

ModSecurity is the most popular open source web application firewall. Its built-in, basic functionality simply blocks a client's request if it matches a security rule. However, you can extend ModSecurity in various ways, including through your own custom Perl scripts. Let's see how.

Drupal, the popular CMS platform, doesn't just allow you to create and manage content. You can also set up reporting options to find out more about how your site is being used and visited. Data on user access, content creation, user interaction, and other metrics can help you to modify your site to provide a better experience for users. Reports also support you in assessing how well you're meeting your goals for the site. Let's set up some basic reporting in Drupal 7, and see how to use the View and Google Analytics modules to get more report data.

In the first article in this series I pointed out some problems I and other LibreOffice users have with the standard LibreOffice color palette, and I talked about how colors are specified, both on computers in general and within LibreOffice .soc files. Let's now see how to generate a new set of colors.