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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!"
Pictures of the Sun equipment. Coral Cahed to boot.
Damn I'm a nice guy!
Does anyone have any opinions on Drupal? How does it compare to other Content Management Systems like LCMS, Rainbow, DotNetNuke, and PHPNuke.
Drupal is a content management system, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal if you want a description.
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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?
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.
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!!
What's google? Do you have a link?
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.....
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
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 http://www.drupal.org/ is a content management system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_sy stem and runs on a computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer. It is written in PHP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP which you can read more about here http://www.php.nt/.
Slashdot has now become "News for wannabe nerds".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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