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Feeling Blue, IBM Courting Drupal

Hot off the gossip wire: IBM is falling for Drupal. Hmmmm. ECM leader IBM has developed a series of nine tutorials for Open Source CMS Drupal. And as it turns out, Drupal runs rather well on IBM Linux servers while plugged-into IBM’s DB2 Express-C database. The final tutorial covers just exactly how to do that.

The IBM team compared several popular products including Mambo, Typo3, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type, WordPress, and TextPattern before selecting Drupal.

Their decision was based on a list of criteria presented in their first tutorial (see below). The primary items of concern where:

• Separation of content from presentation
• In-place commenting on content
• In-place editing of content
• Threaded discussion groups
• Control of access privileges
• Searching of content
• Authentication before seeing any content
• Session control, including expiration and the signature of legal terms and conditions
• Support community interaction through discussions
• Simple learning curve of the content management system
• Simple administration interface of the content management system to hand off to the client

To quote IBM on their decision to go with Drupal, “Drupal is a relative youngster compared to other content management systems (CMS). However, we got the impression the framework was well written, robust, very extensible, and seemed to have a thriving development community that was generating a lot of adoption and support.”

Here is the visual of their final system evaluations:

Drupal, at its website, lists a number of ways it can be of service in a corporation, including features that enable customizable user roles and permissions, a robust security model, scalability, and the ability to configure and extend functionality to meet specific business needs.

The series of nine Drupal tutorials offered by IBM are:

• Part 1: Introduction and overview
• Part 2: Design for an effective user experience
• Part 3: Building your development environment in Windows
• Part 4: Building your development environment in Linux
• Part 5: Getting started with Drupal
• Part 6: Building a custom module in Drupal
• Part 7: Structuring content for theming using XHTML
• Part 8: Styling content for theming using CSS
• Part 9: Understanding the database layer

So, IBM meets Drupal… and gets on handily. Makes you wonder what the next pairing might be. Could Sun chat-up Joomla? Or Oracle take a fancy to PostNuke? We’ll have to wait and see.