Drupal logo Over the past few weeks I have been steadily working on GO TXT.com.au, creating a new version of the site completely powered by Drupal ( + modules and some custom code). It’s really come a long way, and if you have the time please register and give it a whirl.

Most of the interesting work is with the integration of the SMS classes and all the tracking stuff there. There is a lot of code spent on user-verification and it’s still not ideal. Drupal’s registration system doesn’t seem suited to do you ‘Accept our Terms of Service/Accept our Terms and Conditions?’ style options.

Being built on Drupal 6.1, there are not a lot of modules available to plug directly in to the site. The ones I am relying most heavily on (and recommend to anyone developing a community site) include:

I am however having real issues with Google’s Site Authentication feature for AdSense. Ideally it would be great if the Googlebot could crawl user-only pages, and then be able to serve up some decent content-specific ads (and not something with horribly low eCPMs). I haven’t managed to get it working yet as the Googlebot doesn’t seem to handle the session well, if at all.

Another problem I faced today was with someone trying to create accounts en masse and use that to send heaps of free SMSes. Currently a rather poor hack is patching up that particular problem ;-). 

Moral of the story: Drupal is a fantastically versatile CMS.