Drupal News & Articles

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

Welcome to July 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

As we watch the many drama's in the media, the drama of the media itself trying to survive and the many micro dramas of competition and collaboration in the content management space, it's fun to get points of view from different seats at the table.

Recently we had a chance to discuss the web publishing business, Drupal partnerships, new revenue models for publishers and the quality of modern journalism with Erik Schut, the President of WoodWing Software.

As a provider of Web Publishing technologies and a company that has integrated with the likes of Alfresco, Drupal and most recently eZ Publish, the company is in the thick of the modernizing efforts of publishers. Erik had some interesting ideas to share.

Over the years, the Drupal (news, site) web content management system has had the same problem as any other growing software project: deciding which features are important enough to belong in the core of the software.

One such candidate feature -- which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 -- is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.

Wendell Challenger is an "uber bike geek" and a graduate-level science student studying topics related to evolution. He's also one of the volunteer writers and photographers for Momentum Magazine, a free bi-monthly publication for urban cyclists available in twenty cities in the US and Canada.

When it was decided to build Momentum's, um, momentum, by bringing its free content onto the Web, Challenger took on the project. Free and open source seemed a no-brainer between his scientific background and the free, community nature of the magazine. At Open Web Vancouver 2009 (news, site) he shared his experience.

What ho! Is that a new version of WordPress (news, site)  we spy?

The answer is yes. But of course, you probably knew already; WordPress 2.8 was released for immediate download toward the end of last week. Just like most seasoned blogging platform fans, we’ve come to expect big things from the system. This time, the newest version not only fits the usual bill, it also presents some pretty stiff competition for other platforms like Drupal.

Liza Kindred of Lullabot (news, site) began her talk at the Open Web Vancouver conference on open source business with a video of Dr. Vandana Shiva discussing saving seeds to preserve the right of farmers to grow their crops the way they have for thousands of years. Dr. Shiva referred to this practice of preserving traditional knowledge as open seeds, and compared it to open source.

Her point was that by going into an open source business, you have the opportunity to do more than just make a profit. By playing well with others, you can do so much more.

When Angela @webchick Byron started writing a talk about women in open source for Open Web Vancouver 2009, she found the topic silly. In fact, she planned not to talk about that at all. There was no shortage of women. Instead, she would focus on recruiting people to projects.

Then she looked for data to support her theory. Except, she was in for a wee surprise.

WoodWing (news, site)  helps new and traditional media to work smarter through the use of technology. Its latest content manager sees the company open its arms to the new generation of browsers.

As nearly every article we publish on the topic attests, there is no best CMS -- there's only best fit given the context, if that. At the recent DrupalCamp in Helsinki Exove, a Finnish technical consulting company focused on open source solutions, presented their take on how to choose the best CMS given the client's project context.

They looked at 4 web content management systems: Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish and CMS Made Simple.

Given the context, it's no surprise that their point of reference was Drupal. But what convinced us to mention the presentation was their concise yet useful take on how the 4 products differed and in what circumstances they encouraged the use of one versus another. Let's have a look.

A market research company is currently interviewing developers about the adoption of various technologies, particularly in open source circles. If you are:

• Programming professionally with open source tools, for revenue-producing work (that is, not inside-the-company-only apps)
• Regularly using Drupal, Joomla, SugarCRM, WordPress or phpBB
• In the U.S. or Canada
• Willing to answer some questions (both online and, ideally, by phone)

Head here to sign up.

Your information will be kept entirely confidential. Participants will be sent a summary of the results in early summer, and those who are interviewed by phone will receive a $25 Amazon gift certificate as a thank you for their time.

When Acquia (news, site) came out with the Drupal Stack (DAMP) Installer, many new users likely got very excited. You can use this installer to download and install everything you need to get a Drupal (news, site) web content management environment up and running with a single click on a Mac or Windows system. But while it was a good way to get Drupal up and running quickly, it didn't have everything you may have wanted.

Acquia asked the community what new features they would like to see with the DAMP Installer and the community responded -- multisite support. Acquia, of course, obliged.

So, web analytics has been a hot topic since, well, ever. The benefits yielded from knowing customer behavior patterns have been--and continue to be--quite clear.

The value formula is simple. If website owners and giant advertisers can track tidbits of information as detailed as which DOM nodes a mouse hovers over and as broad as which sites you like to visit, targeted marketing (and sales) effectiveness improves for those who know how to intelligently act on the data.

A related road less traveled is one paved by the staggering amount of people that abandon websites before doing much of anything. But here to prove that paying attention to the negative stats can be just as rewarding is a company called SeeWhy. Their new analytics tool, Abandonment Tracker, recently caught our eye.

Anyone trying to evaluate open source content management systems is aware that there aren't a lot of recent, useful comparative reviews. What's surprising is that this issue is true even for such popular solutions as Drupal and Joomla.

Stating in January that, "most comparisons of Drupal (news, link) and Joomla (news, link) conclude that you should select the one that best suits your needs. However, they give too little guidance about how to do that," Webology eBusiness Solutions set out to quantify the pros and cons of each by releasing a survey.

As we've discussed before, the semantic web is supposed to help with issues where computers just have no idea of what they're seeing in any context. The problem was getting people to take advantage of this technology in any real numbers.

Well, if you care about Search Engine Optimization (and who doesn't?) then it's time to wake up and smell the semantics. Otherwise, your search results will plummet as SEO gold goes to those who take advantage of Google's new tool: the Rich Snippet.

And Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) seems to agree completely.