A herald of things to come in web applications
We believe the future of web applications is to make them modular and extensible. Drupal, a combination content management system and programming library, does just that. Most web sites we do are based upon this excellent system. While complex, this system can greatly reduce development time, cost of ownership, and your security vulnerabilities.
Drupal has been around since 2000 but in recent years has been getting attention worldwide. It is not the only option, but most agree the more complicated your site, the better Drupal is. Organizations using it include The US Whitehouse, The New York State Senate, Amnesty International, AT&T, Mattel, and Sun Microsystems. The three big CMS Applications are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal but recently Drupal has been getting all of the awards. Don't have much time? The Video on the left from pingVision can give you the one minute tour.
While we could say a lot about Drupal, we felt you would be more interested in what others are saying. So we went out to YouTube and found several short videos to provide you more information. This first, from David Skarjune, an electronic document specialist with Windustry, does a very good job of explaining what a CMS is and compares the big three (Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal).
David talks about Wordpress and it is a very good choice for very simple sites. But if you need more power and security you are left to either Drupal or Joomla. Joomla does allow extensibility and has a reputation of having a very easy front end. But from what we have heard it does not have the granularity or functionality that Drupal has, We are not Joomla developers but we thought you might like to hear from someone who was.
This next is from a convert. I would give him credit by name but he left only a user name. He mentions something very important aside from his opinion of Joomla. One thing that many state as an advantage that Joomla has is the number of available templates. What they don't tell you is that with very few steps most Joomla templates can be readily converted to Drupal. The book Front End Drupal from Emma Jane Hogbin and Kontantin Kafer describes exactly the steps necessary to do this.
So what about a corporate prespective. In 2008 Scott Mattoon, Chief Architect, U.S. Western Region Sun Microsystems, did an interview on Sun Developer Network. He discussed Drupal from his prespective at Sun. He also mentions the exposure that other corporations are having to this and other Open Source technologies. Since this discussion Drupal Version 6 has been released and version 7 will be released anytime. The user base has moved from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. In versions up to 6 only MySQL and Postgre databases were officially supported but I have heard that in version 7 the database support is going to expand. This implies that high end commercial databases like Oracle may soon be supported.
Finally I wanted to give you the perspective of a non-profit organization. Kristin Antim, Online Community Builder for the Center for Victims of Torture relates her organization's experiences with Drupal and how it benefits them.
There is one other resource you may want to look at. A video titled "Is Drupal Right for My Website?" was done by Lee Raney at the 2009 Dallas Drupal Camp that may be of interest. I did not include it here because of its length(apx 1hr.). In this video he discusses the reasons he chose Drupal, some of the alternatives out there, and things that you need to consider when choosing a CMS. One of the more interesting discussions is why commercial CMS systems are not doing well and why Drupal is.
