Sign in / up

back to article Open source Drupal takes Gardens path to big business

Even as we rapidly approach a future where most software lives on the web, with acronyms like HTML5 and SaaS pointing the way, it's easy to overlook a primary building blog of yesterday's web, Drupal, and its effects on the future web. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert claims that Drupal already powers one per cent of the web. Could …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Matt 21

    Strange not to see any mention of Joomla or others

    I would have thought ithey'd have to be mentioned in such an article. I think Joomla is at leats as weidespread as Drupal.

    I can't personally say that one is better than the other but Joomla does seem easier to use, for me.

    0 0
  2. bob's hamster

    And the others?

    Nice free publicity for Drupal. But why not mention any of the equally well-used Open-source CMS systems with millions of developers that power just as many websites i.e. Wordpress or Joomla! Wordpress may have some limitation due to its blogging origin but Joomla! is equally adept at scalable CMS solutions and is probably a lot easier to set up and use.

    0 1
    1. Kevin Bailey
      Reply Icon

      Tried one then the other etc

      About seven years ago I looked in detail at which CMS to use and initially thought zope was best.

      Then checked out again about 4-5 years ago and went with mambo which then forked to Joomla. I checked out Drupal but wasn't happy with it.

      Now last year I was forced to look into Drupal for a client's existing site - and can now say that I've 'got it'. As mentioned elsewhere - there is a learning curve but the strength is that it is completely modular and you can do anything. To start with Drupal installs with very little - it's once you add in CCK, Views, CKeditor, IMCE, Path, etc etc that it starts to be really powerful.

      Drupal Gardens looks good as for many 'standard' sites I find I'm setting up the same things again and again - so having quite a few set up at the beginning would be nice - and being able to keep a basic site setup to copy from and use as a template would be nicer still.

      0 0
    2. Matt Asay
      Reply Icon

      Wasn't overlooking Joomla...

      Joomla is an awesome web CMS...but it wasn't the point of this article. I mentioned WordPress because the focus was on commercialization of Drupal, and WordPress offers a good counterpoint as to how another open-source project stands in its way in that area. Joomla does not because it is not directly monetized.

      The focus of this article was Drupal and its efforts to turn "a whole lot of free" into "a whole lot of cash"...while not sacrificing the freedom. As such, there are some great technologies - like Joomla - that I simply didn't cover, but your point is a good one.

      0 0
  3. Andy Fletcher

    Please God in Heaven no.

    "To truly make it a standard, Drupal must become as easy to use as a template-driven build experience"

    Not as far as I'm concerned.

    PC's have becomne "easy" to use, so we have huge bot nets because the layman is lulled into the false sense that he's capable of managing his own security, or that someone else is doing it for him. This wasn't happening back when only real men operated computers.

    I actually LIKE the fact that Drupal has a relatively steep learning curve, and requires a basic at least understanding of coding (PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and so on). This keeps the layman at bay. Let them all create database driven sites and they won't keep them up to date, they'll get hacked, and the web will get nearer to meltdown as all the bandwidth gets eaten up.

    If "normal people" want to publish content withouthaving to learn a single piece of code, let them use FaceBook.

    2 0
    1. Matt Asay
      Reply Icon

      Templates AND code geekery

      I think Drupal needs both. Your point that it's great because you can dig deep and get your hands dirty is absolutely one of the benefits of Drupal...and will remain such, even if Drupal also adds a template-driven experience through Gardens. It's an additional choice, not the removal of one. For many, Drupal needs to be easier to use. Gardens gives them this, without taking away your ability to futz with code. That's a good thing, no?

      0 0
  4. Rob Davis

    It's capable, but needs suitable marketing for new arenas such as for business information systems

    Inter-operability is key. It's a fact of life that most businesses have several different systems. Rather than carpet over all of them, Drupal should inter-operate, e.g. with SAP, Sharepoint, etc.

    Drupal has many strengths applicable to business situations:

    - tagging/taxonomy/synonyms to identify content. Content can have multiple tags, information becomes self organising, rather than being placed in rigid hierachical folder systems that get eroded by re-organisations,marketing names for products versus internal-code names for products.

    - precise user permissions management to access and modify content

    - clean meaningful URLs without .aspx, .php? etc in sight

    As for Joomla and Wordpress, great alternatives but Drupal is a superset of all of them, its disadvantage being that these are already well established in their areas of strength and they are optimised to be easier to set up for those areas.

    1 0
    1. hawodi
      Reply Icon

      Joomla!

      "As for Joomla and Wordpress, great alternatives but Drupal is a superset of all of them....."

      Joomla is already implementing most of the features that was lacking but in Drupal. One of my greatest challenge using Joomla was fine grain user permission and this is been addressed already.

      It's still a lot lot faster to build site with Joomla than with Drupal but I think the current Joomla releases are beginning to be step as well.

      0 0
  5. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    And the point is?

    I don't really understand this article. Is the point that Drupal's army of crazed supporters are waiting to support you if you drink the Drupal kool-aid? (Hat off to Neal Stephenson for the metaphor). If so this is equally true of many CMS, which are indeed eating into the enterprise CMS business now that it has become commodified? And from what I have recently seen of Interwoven the bar for being an enterprise CMS seems pretty low. Coming from the Python world Plone, Pylons and Django spring to my mind as doing much the same thing but with fewer reported security issues. While this is good to see for anyone who remembers the obscene licence fees that CMS vendors used to charge it's not really news. Maybe the more important point is dangling the carrot of being able to switch vendors fairly quickly which the article suggests the "Gardens" thing offers. Certainly being able to get your data out of a vendors clutch is interesting for enterprise customers but not the main thing as migration is *always* difficult and nobody believes in plug and play anymore.

    0 0
  6. Gareth

    Hosted CMS' not for Enterprises?

    Are you sure about Gardens, Squarespace, other SaaS CMS' being enterprise-oriented? Seems to me that they are more aimed at small(er) businesses who don't have the resources or staff to manage complex websites in-house.

    The larger enterprises I've worked with have in-house teams and a strong desire to keep everything hosted internally.

    Joomla is awful for non-trivial projects (ie. anything that's not a brochure site or small social network). Drupal isn't all that great either but they're moving in the right direction, and it's far faster to build a solid content-driven application in Drupal than in a lower level framework like Zend.

    0 0
    1. Kevin Bailey
      Reply Icon

      Agreed...

      To me it's a case of layers.

      C++ is used to build PHP.

      PHP is used to build Zend.

      Zend is used to build Drupal.

      Drupal has lots of add-on modules

      Drupal plus modules are used to build Drupal Gardens.

      As you go up you sacrifice control for ease of use.

      Personally I really like the fact that standard Drupal does not install very much at all - it means it keeps the installation clean. And I like the fact that the modules fight it out to provide the best ways of extending Drupal.

      1 0
    2. hawodi
      Reply Icon

      Is Zend a CMS?

      Zend is a PHP framework for building applications. Drupal, Joomla are cms application framework.

      0 0
      1. Kevin Bailey
        Reply Icon

        Zend is not a CMS

        It's a set of PHP libraries - and can be used as the basis of MVC based web applications.

        0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like