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!"
Pictures of the Sun equipment. Coral Cahed to boot.
Damn I'm a nice guy!
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.
Does anyone have any opinions on Drupal? How does it compare to other Content Management Systems like LCMS, Rainbow, DotNetNuke, and PHPNuke.
Is Drupal going to be running Solaris, or are they going to install Linux (SPARC) instead?
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
As you can tell from the way the drupal.org site is (not) responding, it is still being run from the old server.
Now sun have donated a server with dual Opteron and 4G RAM. This alone would probably have been enough to host the drupal site wiht a serious improvement in performance. But they've also purchased 3 Dell 1850s with dual Xeons and 2G RAM.
Given what was serving the site before, do they really need all this horsepower? With the unexpected server donation from Sun, could the money raised have been better spent on something other than more servers?
... fix the vulnerabilities in Drupal. http://www.kdedevelopers.org/ was running Drupal and was hacked into.
Good for Drupal. Glad to see that people still care about others projects.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Oh, and I was curious what drupal was too, the slashdot link doesn't give much more info than that it's a CMS, and drupal.org is down (looks like they haven't installed the new hardware in time for slashdot).
Here's the wikipedia with link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal [wikipedia.org]
Drupal is a content management framework, content management system and blogging engine which was originally written by Dries Buytaert and is the software used to power Debian Planet [1], Terminus1525 [2], Spread Firefox [3] and Kernel Trap [4], among others. Drupal is written in PHP using strict coding standards.
Drupal is the English spelling for the Dutch word 'druppel' which means 'drop'.
Though it started as a small bulletin board system, Drupal has become much more than just a news portal, thanks to its flexible architecture. Drupal has a basic layer, or core, which supports pluggable modules that enable additional behaviors. The modules available for Drupal provide a wide assortment of features, including e-commerce systems, workflow, photo galleries, mailing list management, and CVS integration. Drupal's taxonomy/classification module is especially interesting, in that it allows any content to be classified with a flexible tagging system.
Some of the more special roles that Drupal has filled include company intranets, online classrooms, art communities and project management. Many feel that Drupal's focus on user communities is what makes it stand out from its competition.
CMSs are used by some people to make wonderful stuff used by millions... stuff that they wouldn't be able to do by themselves.
Example: several years ago I made a free info site that gets 5k unique visitors a day. Many people benefit greatly from what I've posted there (a lot of text, some useful web tools, etc.).
Back when I was making it, I had absolutely no php (or anything similar) skills and simply wouldn't have done that website. I made it because there were some CMSs. And many people benefited my work (and indirectly the work of people that made my CMS).
Now... I don't see how is a driver for some device for not so popular OS far more useful than millions of people being able to use CMS-based websites. Both things are important, let's just not be "my stuff is the only important thing"-like nazis.
OMG!
The money they recieved were from donations. Not a penny was from someone who didn't want Drupal to have that money.
"Donations like this should be going to people doing things worth being done"
This is the stupidest thing I've read in a long time... Donations are given to people/projects which the donators think are doing something worthwhile, hence the donation!
I can't think of a singel thing to better prove if something is of value than other people giving money to support the continued development.
*shakes head*
It is so simple really.
You don't think Drupal is good? -Don't donate!
If someone else think it's good and they donate, don't bitch and whine about it. Clearly they feel that Drupal is WORTH IT!!
That's because drupal has their own development infrastructure and does not use sourceforge's services. Just because a project isn't hosted on sourceforge doesn't mean its not relevant. I switched to drupal from Post-Nuke about 6 months ago and will never go back.
Everyone should believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.....
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
either the new horsepower hasn't been put in place yet, or they need more money to buy better machines ;) (or optimise the software, duh)
or maybe it got a sudden bump of popularity somehow... can't quite think of what it might be...
bp
Who is to say that Drupal, if they get a foundation together, might not use some of their newly found horsepower to support/host other projects that are getting off the ground, or need their help?
... or summer internships for a few kids ... or something useful like that.
Personally, i'd love to see them use their new stuff for the betterment of their project and a few others. Also, it'd be great to see them take the excess money and invest it in such a way that it can continually pay for their operating costs
Here's to hoping.
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:
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'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/