26 January 2010

Digging and digging into Drupal open source cms

11 thoughts on “Digging and digging into Drupal open source cms
  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention Digging and digging into Drupal open source cms | Bridge-Blog -- Topsy.com

  2. Hi Joris,

    interesting article, thanks for the contribution! I absolutely agree with you on the power open source will have on the future of software development. In the media you can read very frequently nowadays that even the larger corporations and governments start implementing open source technology.
    I believe that the inception of open source is today and focuses mainly on web-related systems. But in the next years, it will spread to business critical systems and large software applications (with the help of google and maybe even microsoft?).

    I wonder what is your vision about the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the open source CMS community. The past years so many open source systems have been initiated. There are a few well known systems with a large community (like drupal, joomla, typo3, wordpress and others). But will they all co-exist or will there be one or two dominant systems? I can see that typo3 develops into enterprise content management and document management. Maybe such initiative will become popular in the corporate world and will thus dominate the market?

    I look forward to your insight on that.

    Hugo

  3. Hi Joris,

    Very informative article, when I used to get project requests I always wondered whether there was an open CMS which can satisfy all requirement, but never found one even with all the plugins, and most of the time we chose from different open source CMS’s or we either did the easier part, custom programming using a framework, like Zend Framework for example. We never tried Drupal, I wanted to know from your experience whether you were able to develop all customer requirements in drupal, or did you had to go for custom programming with a framework.

    And one more thing, why did you switch from joomla to drupal. because as far i see now joomla with all the extensions can match most requirements. what is the main addition to drupal when compared with joomla ?

    Thanks in advance,
    Jeffy

  4. Hi joris,

    Great article, I am big fan of drupal now.I am looking forward for drupal 7. When compared to other CMS its very easy to get into drupal.The content type and view module is so cool in drupal that you can make any forms and view it contents with so ease.

    Jeffy you are absolutely right that there is no content management which satisfy all the requirements even with all plugins/extensions. So to overcome these limitation all these all CMS provide the user to add new modules and drupal is great example of this, you can make new modules, implement hook on
    existing modules or features. Joris has stated the very good links for a developer to get started and drupal community so really awesome that you can get every help out of it.

    The Only this i am unhappy with drupal is updates, we have keep on updating modules and core often, that’s boring task.

  5. Hello Joris,

    Very informative article. I missed just one thing. A good book to have is “Pro Drupal Development”. Really gets the starting developer up to speed in a hurry.

    I totally agree with you on the maturing of open source products. I’ve worked at a closed source CMS supplier and at a closed source CMS implementor, but when we started our own company, we focussed on Open Source products. We initially looked into Joomla as well, but we realised early on that with Drupal we can meet the customer’s needs more easily and often better.

  6. @HugoMesser
    It’s hard to say wich system will survive and wich doesn’t. All I can see now is that Drupal has a very strong roadmap. community and association. Typo3 cms is also a great one, but there are also a lot of frameworks, like Ruby on Rails & Django to build your websolution. And there is Magento for webshops off course.
    I think each stable, scalable system and community will find it’s way. For every specific need (cms, doc manager, intranet, news management, webshop, etc ) there will be an optimal solution (system).

    @Jeffy
    Our main focus is Drupal, is a customer request is best build in Drupal we pass over the customer to a partner. But be aware: Drupal is a very powerful framework aprt from being a cms. To loots of features en thus requests can be build in cleanly en effectivly.

    @Gerben
    That is is indeed a very good one.
    Check out this list for more books: http://drupal.org/books

    For people how want a comparison with Joomla. some extra info:

    I think both systems are best used for it’s purposes. Joomla! for small companies, small administrator groups, no need for extensive content organisation, multi-site or acl. There’s a lot of coding (3rd party) for Joomla! that fills these needs, but most of them build their own frames upon Joomla-cms, it doesn’t use a uniform Node Based System (NBS). This makes this 3rd-party coding less flexible when it comes to migration to major updates. And it makes them less transparant.
    Here is a ‘frank’ list of features that Drupal has on board, but we really miss in Joomla! core.

    –ACL–
    needed for configuring user access control

    –Taxonomy–
    needed for content organization

    –Multi site–
    needed to build easy-maintainable and managable multi-site platform

    –Multi-langual–
    –Node Based System (NBS)–
    needed for a uniform and consistent way of object defining and cms building

    –Hook system–
    –Override system–
    needed for creating W3C valid and SEO sites. Also for creating custom designs/html.

    –Content types and fields (with help of CCK)–
    Needed for creating business objects (content types), management of these types and isolating data in database with help of fields. This isolating is especially needed for making content presentation consistent, ie: theming. With help of fields and content types, your cms users can only manage content you want them to manage, and the input of content can’t go wrong, users just fill in the fields and that’s it! The theming system will do the correct presentation. (if you dont use, or very restricted, WYSIWYG)

    –Content management workflow–
    example: user1 creates content item, user2 checks it, user3 publishes it.

    –Version control–
    –Core comments–
    –Core Download system–
    –Extensive Logs en error-reporting–
    –Core Poll–

    As said: it’s very important to do a very good project discovery and choose the correct cms for your needs.

    (published before on http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/090224/drupal-vs-joomla-frank-comparison-ibm-consultant)

  7. I am very pleased to hear that you like our Blog. Please, keep on coming back! And we also appreciate all suggestions. :)

  8. Pingback: Drupal ist das beste Open Source CMS // PANORAMA3000

  9. Superb blog! Do you have any helpful hints for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own website soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you recommend starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m completely overwhelmed .. Any ideas? Thank you!Sugarland Roofing Contractor, 517 W. Hilary Circle, Sugar Land, TX 77498 – (281) 724-3750

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.