Jul
22
Written by:
James Burke
22 July 2007
Jeff Robins of Lullabot presents an intriguing artitle entitled “How Drupal will save the world” that has attracted quite a bit of comment from their website and also via the Digg link.
Drupal is a CMS that was originally written to provide the framework for a bulletin board system and has grown to become a widely adopted extensible CMS that is now rarely used purely for bulletin board applications and more for community driven type websites and blogs.
Stephen Downes, the Canadian educational technologist, has an excellent blog (Stephen’s Web) that is built using Drupal
There are many notable high profile websites that use the Drupal framework to power them including:
A TWIT “Inside the Net” podcast (number 25) provides an good introduction to Drupal by passionate advocate Jeff Robbins of Lullabot.
A good site powered by Drupal that provides reviews on Drupal sites is available at Drupalsites.net
Drupal has attracted many criticisms over the years due to its complexities in installing, administering and using on a daily basis for addition content although with more recent versions this is starting to become less of an issue.
There are however, still some core conceptual issues to be aware of when designing a Drupal powered website that can lead to what feels to be quite a steep initial learning curve compared with other CMS systems/frameworks such as DotNetNuke.
I find that Drupal is a great platform where information is going to be created on a regular basis in small “chunks” by a number of different people that may have common links and relationships. Drupal is very adept at pulling together this apparent disparate content once an installation has been properly setup due in part to the formal taxonomy management capabilities that it has in place. For social networking type applications Drupal can provide a very quick to adopt and develop platform and I suspect that there are many other Web2.0 applications out there that are developed on Drupal but do not necessarily make much of this (maybe due to the nature of their VC funding for development?).