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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!"
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.
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.
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
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.
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