Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

The Drupal Security Team has apparently been working overtime as a slug of new Drupal updates appeared last night.  This includes two (count 'em, two) different new versions of Drupal, and many module updates, all intended to fix security issues.  Drupal 6.18 is a security-only update which fixes security holes and nothing more. 

6.19 on the other hand fixes the security issues and a few other bugs.  We're at the moment trying to sort through all of these updates and figure out which go where for our maintenance customers.  In the meantime, you really ought to be looking seriously at updating your sites at least to 6.18 since the security issues are fairly serious.

I've done a quick development job for Bobfest Northfest. This is sort of a dry run for a 2011 event, Fighting Bob Fest North.  Fighting Bob Fest is a progressive festival that happens every year in Baraboo, Wisconsin, commemorating Fighting Bob LaFollette. 

We are happy to announce that Cruiskeen Consulting LLC is now an Acquia Partner.  We will be partnering with Acquia both to promote Acquia's services, and to have the latest in Drupal training and information from Acquia.  We're looking forward to a fruitful partnership, and will be glad to discuss Acquia services with you, as well as our own.

The recent NTEN report 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey has just been released, and it gives very high marks both to Drupal as a CMS for nonprofits, and to the use of CiviCRM for donor and activist management.

By the way, NTEN is highly recommended.

We are strong supporters of Open Source software in general, and Drupal in particular. We build our web sites (including this one) in Drupal, and are a member of the Drupal Association.  Any purchases made from this page will also help to support the Drupal Association by paying the Drupal Association a 5% portion of your monthly hosting fee.  Drupal hosting with us starts at $8.95 per month for shared hosting, with a discount for nonprofts or paying on a yearly basis.

Our servers are set up to support Drupal.  We have a simple Drupal setup on our servers, which lets you install Drupal with a single click on the web.  This installer is kept up-to-date with new Drupal security releases, generally within a few days of a new release.  Our servers are tuned to support Drupal as well -

Click on the banner below to see our hosting packages:

Drupal Hosting

Most of our hosting services are intended to support the Drupal content management system. We provide managed Drupal hosting where we supply  Drupal and a set of supported Drupal modules. This can include CiviCRM, and a number of other additional packages. Typically our Drupal managed hosting rates start at $65 per month.  We're not a generic hosting service, but have a strong background in UNIX/Linux system administration.   We can work with you on a specialized hosting environment for your needs, including VPS hosting and dedicated managed servers.

A few months ago we launched a new web site for the American Composers Alliance in New York CIty.  ACA is a nonprofit that publishes scores for modern classical composers.

New security-related Drupal releases came out yesterday.  We've already upgraded all of the Drupal 6 web sites that are under maintenance contract to Drupal 6.15.  We will be doing the existing Drupal 5 web sites later today up to 5.21.  So far the upgrade has gone very smoothly, and also fixes a number of bugs in Drupal 6. 

As always, please contact us at the helpdesk email address if you have any issues with your sites.

The White House web site is now a Drupal web site.  The change of whitehouse.gov to Open Source is a welcome change, and may be the harbinger of more to come if this works out well.  The site is handsome and seems well-designed from a first glance.  The use of more Open Source software in government will be welcome, so let's hope this all pans out well.

New versions of Drupal 5 and 6 were released yesterday.  These primarily fix a number of security issues which were recently discovered, and also introduce a number of bug fixes, particularly on Drupal 6. 

We've just released the new web site for the American Composers Alliance, a publisher of classical music based in New York City. Their site makes heavy use of audio  and the Dash media player in Drupal. We're also working on a number of innovative search mechanisms to find compositions by the composers published by ACA.  Enjoy listening to some of the music that ACA publishes.

Drupal Camp WI was great, with a lot of exchange of information and ideas.

Spent a good deal of time both going to the state Democratic Convention, and then making an extended road trip to Troy, Michigan to expand our web server colocation presence.  We now have more servers, more capacity, and higher-speed configurations.

Lots of activity, lots of Drupal talk.  Wish you were here!

A few hours ago the Drupal security team released two new versions of Drupal, primarily to fix a security vulnerability. No fear, we've rather quickly upgraded all of our hosted Drupal sites to the new versions.  Drupal 5 sites were all upgraded to Drupal 5.17 from 5.11.   Drupal 6 sites were upgraded from Drupal 6.10 to Drupal 6.11.

Please let us know if you see any issues with your sites, but this is a fairly minor upgrade and we don't expect to see any new issues.

The Drupal 6.11 upgrade should also fix some issues we've been seeing with sites having trouble with their menu caching systems - this has primarily made a lot of bogus error messages, but in some cases it has caused some noticeable performance issues.

The CiviCRM folks are having a documentation sprint to write a new CiviCRM book.  This is something that's been needed now for some time.  The book will be available as a free download, or as a printed book you can purchase.  We'll let you know when it's available, and what we think of it.

There's a new report on CMS systems from the folks at Idealware.  Ignore the fact that we're one of the sponsors ard are listed in the report -it's a really good unbiased view of the different CMS systems and how they would fit into a nonprofit's world.