Drupal - From student's tool to enterprise CMS
In the year 2000, some Belgian university students started sharing a broadband internet connection. One of them, Dries Buytaert, developed a web based message board on which he and his fellow students could exchange information regarding the status of their internet connection. The software was under continuous development which stimulated them to put their internal website online as a place where they could exchange ideas, keep in touch and leave messages about their personal lifes. This online community website was to be named ‘dorp.org’, but due to a typing error during the domain name registration process, it ended up being called ‘drop.org’.
In January 2001, Buytaert decided to release the software behind ‘drop.org’ as an open source project. He called it ‘Drupal’, the English pronunciation for the Dutch word ‘druppel’ which means ‘drop’.
Over the years, Drupal attracted a huge global community of developers and the platform morphed into a modular framework for managing different types of websites: from personal blogs over community portals, intranet applications, social networking sites to large corporate websites. So while Drupal may be the content management tool behind your local sports club website, it’s also running multi-server sites of organizations like Sony BMG Music, Forbes, Amnesty International and Time Warner’s AOL . Today, around 125.000 public websites are running on Drupal (and probably many more are sitting behind firewalls), while Amplexor used the open source platform into Belgian websites like UZLeuven and UiTinVlaanderen.be. Drupal was the overall winner of the Packt Open Source Awards in 2007 and 2008.
What makes Drupal so popular is the modularity of its framework: the Drupal ‘core’ comes with a number of ‘modules’ (= features that can be enabled in a very simple way to achieve the desired functionality) and ‘themes’ (to customize the look-and-feel of the site). To make things even more appealing: there are thousands of freely available contributed modules and themes available which can extend the functionality, alongside the core modules and themes. All of which makes building websites with Drupal Lego-like: you pick the blocks you need and put them together into what you want.
Drupal is best known for its public websites, but can also be used for internal applications like knowledge management systems. Its modularity llows easy integration of other tools. In our next seminar we will demonstrate these features, including an integration with the document management system Alfresco.
But as with many open source packages, enterprise organizations are quite reluctant to adopt them for production environments. Understandably, they want to be able to get guaranteed support and maintenance services for the software they run. This is where commercial open source comes in: in 2008 Buytaert co-founded a ompany called Acquia which provides commercial support and services for the Drupal platform. Subscribers to the Acquia Network gain access – depending on their type of subscription – to technical support (e-mail or phone), subscriber forums and remote network services that simplify and automate the operation of your Drupal website. Amplexor has become the first Belgian gold partner of Acquia.
More info on Drupal and Acquia: http://drupal.org/ and http://acquia.com/