Slashdot Mirror
Drupal Gets Non-Profit Backing
DrupalAssociation writes "Drupal, the popular and widely used CMS, now has the backing of a non-profit association. Having grown in size and scope for the last six years, the Drupal software project needs more structured support with infrastructure, marketing and funding. The Drupal Association will help with these needs but will not be directly involved with Drupal software development. Donations are now being solicited. Plans for Corporate and individual membership are being drawn and will be announced at a later time. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and the President of the Association, announced the Association on Drupal.org today."
The Drupal Association will help with these needs but will not be directly involved with Drupal software development. Donations are now being solicited.
So my donation to Drupal will not be used to suppord development of Drupal? what?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Not only are there a dozen things labeled "CMS", even the ones that are supposedly the same (such as Code Management Systems) disagree on what a CMS really is or does.
I just steer away from that sort of thing on principle....
From their FAQ:
Why does Dries, and not the Drupal Association, hold the domain name?
Dries has always retained access to the domain name, and has a proven track history of being responsible with its care. The Drupal Association as yet is unestablished, and would represent a great risk to place something so important to the community in its hands, at least at this stage.
In my limited experience with non-profits and owning/running a website that goes along with them, it is in the best interest of everyone that the holdings be owned by the association rather than individuals tied to the association. Simply put, regardless of how someone has dealt with the ownership in the past, if anything goes south, the first response is sometimes to spite them and yank the holdings and then you're screwed.
Operating the business behind the domain is one thing but having full ownership of it is another. If the group is serious about this being the face of Drupal, I suggest that they go into it the entire way before something similar to the recent ESR drama and they pull out after years of support.
One really anoying thing with PHP/MySQL Solutions is that there's so many of them. And a lot are so crappy it's unbelievable.
:-) .
Here's my breakdown of systems worth mentioning and that I've worked with/administrated/looked into:
Typo3 - the scariest heap of PHP code ever. 7 years of historically grown code mess. Don't even think of looking at the current data model. The operating system of OSS CMSes, the first to sport a proper GUI and an own configuration language and heavy Ajax use in the backend (before it was called Ajax). Large community. Despite the mess it is, its performance requirements and it's notably difficult install process, it is a very powerfull, flexible, secure and stable system. Usefull extensions number in the thousands and it is one of the bridgeheads of OSS into the corporate world and powers a notable amout of large scale / high profile / heavy traffic websites. It's extremly popular in web agencies throughout the german speaking world (probably because it had a german backend from early on) and basically has allready grown beyond critical mass in Europe. Reddot regularly pee their pants when they hear 'Typo3'. The Webagencies using it as their prime tool are actually called Typo3 agencies sometimes. You can make a fair living as a Typo3 expert in Germany. There's a regular magazine on Typo3 (some articles in english as free PDF available: http://www.yeebase.com/home/ ) and 20+ german books about it.
If you want to dive into an OSS CMS for good it's not the worst choice. If T3 doesn't have it, you probably don't need it. However the learning curve is steep and it's a german-style overengineered monster, despite being initially built by a danish guy. You have been warned.
Note: The T5 team (a subgroup of the core T3 community) is currently rebuilding an entirely new architecture from scratch and plans to be finished with the new branch (Typo3 5.0) in about 2 years. Which actually keeps me interested in the project.
EZ Publish - same league as T3 yet smaller community. Backend less scary. Probably less features.
Joomla - descendant of Mambo, factually it's successor. My and many others favourite. The first turnkey OSS CMS that doesn't look like shit. Hence the raging success. Installation is a breeze. Considered a strong competitor to Typo3 in Germany, despite lacking a German backend. Which means a lot, because Typo3 owns Germany (see above). 1000+ Extensions and Plugins and many German books on it and a magazine aswell - which went broke after 3 issues though
PHP CMS - yes it's called that way. Very small, simple, no DB needed. My first. Not very big but good enough for small sites.
Drupal seems to much between the above and the Wordpress/b2evolution Blog-park to be of interest to me. I've heard alot about it, he community is very active and a lot of people in the T3 and Joomla Camp accept it as one of theirs. However, there's only so much systems you can look into before it get's pointless. Drupal may be worth a try aswell for those who are interested.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's not part of the platform. That's some random theme you picked. There are themes written well and themes not written well. Dries and others are extremely picky with the code allowed into the drupal core.
I have intimate knowledge of the drupal code and can easily say the parent is not at all informative. Drupal modules and core have no code that looks anything like this.
Developers: We can use your help.
I've been using Drupal for years and could not disagree more. I was on the developer's mailing list for a long time helping out people new to the code. I contributed a few modules. I stuck with Drupal after trying many many other options. None were better written (for PHP). Most other projects do not pay as much attention to the platform aspect of their software. And most other systems aren't as easy or flexible enough to add modules.
BTW, if a module you like isn't supported in 4.7, keep on using 4.6. There's usually no reason at all to upgrade your Drupal installation unless there are completely new features you need.
Developers: We can use your help.
What bizarro world do you live in?
... are published on the web site. Dries himself frequently runs benchmarks on Drupal and identifies areas where a patch can be improved. The community also polices itself when it comes to contributed modules, and tries to avoid overlap between them.
Yes, Drupal maintains high code standards, which are frequently a reason not to commit patches. All these practices, as well as detailed guidelines in terms of security, API usage, theming, localization,
Besides Dries, there are 4 other people with core commit access (including me). Two of those were added about a year ago, matching our increased growth. They are respected community members who have demonstrated fair and balanced judgement and excellent technical skills. We all maintain the same standards, and give each patch a fair review. For the Drupal 5.0 release, almost 500 people submitted patches. Several of those affected key parts of Drupal's core. Many of those have been and are still being developed as contributed modules that are slowly seeping into core. For example, Drupal 5 includes user-definable content types, which was incorporated from CCK.module.
When a patch is rejected, there is always a good reason given. Most people however forget that Drupal is used and deployed in a variety of scenarios, and that what goes for them doesn't necessary apply to others. This is why we try to make sure that as many parts of Drupal can be altered, extended or removed by modules, so that nobody needs to create a fork (which causes update/maintenance hassles).
I've been using it for 18 months and never work with code like that. That's simple template code, more suitable for dabblers and graphic designers. Drupal actually has multiple template rendering engines that allow you to make a page look like whatever you want. Here are a few examples:
http://www.yourmtb.com/
http://www.yourclimbing.com/
http://www.theonion.com/
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ (yes, really)