Slashdot Mirror
Community, OSL and Sun Jump to Drupal's Rescue
Robert Douglass writes "Drupal asked for help and received a major dose of it. Sun Microsystems has stepped up and donated a Sun Fire V20z server which will be the backbone of Drupal's new server architecture at the Open Source Lab. Furthermore, over $10,000 in donations were collected in a matter of a couple days (thanks to all the people who responded to the previous /. post!), plus thousands more in pledges from groups like Apress and CivicSpaceLabs... looks like the community loves Drupal!"
Remind me what Drupal is again given there isn't an obvious link to a "What is Drupal?" page.
Maybe Slashcode should adopt a system that automatically links to topics that the story poster does not define.
Is Drupal going to be running Solaris, or are they going to install Linux (SPARC) instead?
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Well, considering that it is being backed so heavily by the community and is used on larger sites (i.e. mozilla.org) I would say that it has its place among the others...
I haven't tried all of the above but I did examine PHPNuke for a short time because of Gallery's ability to easily integrate with it. I gave up on PHPNuke and went w/Drupal instead because of word-of-mouth even though Gallery v1 doesn't support Drupal integration.
I came up with my own way to integrate my existing Gallery v1 setup into Drupal because their "blocks" allow you to run custom PHP code (or any code via external calls) in them.
I have been quite pleased with Drupal and am looking forward to the new directions all the donations by the community, Sun, and OSL will bring.
Good for Drupal. Glad to see that people still care about others projects.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
So, I've run/am running sites on mambo, drupal, Postnuke, Xoops, and Wordpress.
WP is superior for simple blogging
Mambo is superior for running a "newsy" kind of site
Postnuke is superior for running a "fanboy" kind of site with lots of galleries, downloads, and discussion boards
I find Drupal interesting - if only because of the wierd taxonomy/node system. I think it's best used for non-traditional creative group writing, but it falls short of the others in their respective categories for numerous reasons. I've also found it SO tightly written that its very difficult to make significant modifications.
All just my opinions of course.
It so easily drops into a how much does it pay ? from it's cool, that's why I do it !. Speaking as someone who got paid a couple of thousand bucks to work on OSS, I just didn't feel like I was working for that rush anymore. The change was very shocking to me at first, then I realized WHY open source is popular - because it lets people work on what they like (want is ambigous because people might want a bounty job).
On the other hand, more hardwareBut yeah, SUN's just showing off !. Sort of like a PR stunt - but it's good for drupal , so we don't mind.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/07/14/Dru
It seems that he deserves some credit for starting the ball rolling.
A nice comment in the article:
Drupal is very easy to customize. We turned it into a really cool location based community now complete with Google Maps. A place where you can share cool (or interesting, or weird) locations related to almost any interest.
Then, you can take them with you on your handheld.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Which Mambo? The open source version or the corporate version by Miro?
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
It was fixed earlier this week with the help of the drupal team. The biggest problem with drupal is that it requires so little babysitting to keep running it can get easy to ignore it when you are busy. Note that I am a KDE developer and not a web monkey, so I have bigger fish to fry than dorking with a server. The install that was present there was over 1 year old, and was missing a security patch that was issued the day before (the xmlrpc bug).
;)
Knowing this the drupal guys are working on a more automated way to push out updates so busy people like me who just want something to "just work" can do so safely.
That said, I am pleased to note that the ISP has provided us with the names of the people who cracked the site. The kiddy who got in was nice enough to leave all of the logs unmodified, and left a few other tracks so it was pretty easy to confirm the source. Personally I think the liberal use some 10 penny nails on their joy department would be more amusing if only I had the time to get to Moscow.
I've built several sites on a Drupal foundation, including one significant community newspaper site that provides free blogs and photo galleries to thousands of community members. I'm very impressed with Drupal. Here are the major strengths and weaknesses as I see them.
Strengths:
* Stability.
* Scalability. Configurable page caching is in the core feature set. Session data is in the database, so if you need to serve to the whole planet, you can deploy an array of web servers.
* Extensibility. There's a very well-documented module API and a number of community-supported extensions that use it. A module called Flexinode lets you easily define new structured content types.
* Integration. The authentication system can interoperate with a number of external sources, ranging from LDAP to LiveJournal. There are plug-ins for ecommerce payment systems, Amazon, etc.
* Presentational flexibility. There are several optional templating engines; one (PHPTemplate) supports full PHP functionality, so you can not only customize the look and feel, but also easily integrate all sorts of information from non-Drupal sources without cursing. Content and presentation are reasonably well separated. Modules tend to assume that HTML is the target output format, but even that could be changed with some PHPTemplate magic.
* RSS support. Just about everything can have its own feed, and file attachments automatically become enclosures. Result: Instant podcasting.
Weaknesses:
* Forums. The message board module is basic and does not, for example, let you promote a comment to base note status, or even move a comment from one thread to another.
* Photo gallery support. The standard stuff is weak, no competition for Gallery. There is no support for integrating Gallery 1. There is a Gallery2 integration module, but G2 is unfortunately a flaky, poorly documented moving target.
In operation, it's fast. It has a lot of modules, and writing new ones is pretty easy. Although it does not look like an OO system, the way it's been constructed it acts like one. Object-orientation built out of function calls, will wonders never cease. The contributed modules are of varying quality. It's non-trivial to wade into them looking to fix things unless you're conversant with Drupal-specific functions. The workflow of how modules work is sane. They have by default a "verification" phase for submitting forms.
It tends towards the "two- or three-column Web layout that everybody uses", with a main body and one or two sidebars. I hate, hate, hate this look, but everybody expects it. Pah! Savages.
I've found that unsophisticated users can use the Web forms to create content well enough. Even very unsophisticated users can manage the content on their site. In order to allow this, however, you'll spend a lot of time in the admin pages making tweaks and changing settings.
Multiple theme options. It doesn't lend itself well to "this page looks like this, but this page is completely different", but it can be done.
As a CMS, it's not the most sophisticated, but it meets 90% of what even sophisticated users need. You can even use it to manage documents and suchlike, if not perfectly. The image-handling functions are painfully Web-application-like. It's not iPhoto.
I run several Drupal-backed sites, and to admin them is pretty simple. Often I find myself frustrated with Drupal for some simple thing that it won't let me do without writing a new module, but in calmer times I remember where I'd be if I had built the site from scratch--still writing code, not getting paid to admin a functioning site. That said, using the default admin sidebar, you'll spend half your life drilling down through stupid link-trees to get to frequently used commands. You will save yourself much trouble by creating a custom menu, or a custom page accessible only to the administrative users with common links and tasks.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
It's really not too hard, but there is a learning curve to understanding the "Drupal" way. We did make some changes to core Drupal code, but that was more us not yet grasping the best way to make changes.
What is the best way? Customizing Drupal through the use of modules. We wrote a few new modules for locations and maps and hacked a few others for groups and users.
We spent about 3 months customizing Drupal. However, the task was made more complex because we had to integrate it with our existing JSP site and existing database.
Read the Customizing and Developing links to learn all you need to know.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
How come when a project like this asks for donations they get tens of thousandths of dollars and hardware to boot, but when a project like NASA World Wind, that uses probably 100x the resources with at least 5x the user base asks for donations, we can barely make up a measly 300$ a month for the one community server. http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/