Drupal News & Articles

Long known as an open source web content management system, Drupal (news, site) has also recently been referring to their solution as social publishing software. Most web content management systems have some sort of social computing capabilities built-in now -- it's almost mandatory these days.

It hasn't exactly been clear though how you use Drupal to create social computing solutions, until now. Packt Publishing has come out with a new book in their Drupal series that teaches us just that -- how to build social networking sites with Drupal.

It's been a week or two since our last round-up of all things web publishing, and it is with pride that we announce that newspapers are still alive.

Setting Records

Earlier this week, newspaper pros gathered in Las Vegas for the Newspaper Association of America's first annual mediaXchange conference. Data from Nielsen Online was presented to indicate that average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper Web sites grew by over 7.9 million in January to 74.8 million visitors -- an increase of 11.9 percent over the same period a year ago.

Like most tech folks, we at CMSWire are fans of Macromedia’s all-encompassing software offerings, but Adobe Contribute especially tickles our fancy.

Adobe Contribute 4 simplifies content management by bridging the gap between word processing and Web publishing several times over. One such trestle is the support of popular blog servers like WordPress.com and Blogger.com.

For Drupal newbies, Christmas has come early. Acquia released the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer nicknamed the DAMP (Drupal + Apache + MySQL + PHP) stack.

With this package, you can download one item, double click and install all of the necessary components to get the Drupal Web CMS up and running.

With DrupalCon well under way now, we are hearing a lot of announcements about new services and upcoming features and functionality for the web content management solution. One very interesting announcement is the official beta release of the new Acquia Search to the public.

A hosted search service for Drupal 6 websites, Acquia Search offers a number of advanced features that will help make your website hum with activity.

For those of you following the DrupalCon DC twitter frenzy, this is already known. For those of you who are not, handily, many of the DrupalCon talks and workshops are now making their way to the web in video format. As of the last check, there were about 20 sessions posted.

Some highlights include:

• Building APIs That Rock
• Advanced Theming Techniques
• Drupal 7: What's Done, What's Coming, and How You Can Help

Head on over to Internet Archive, cherry pick your favorite topics and get your geek on.

Open source web content management systems are starting to gain some traction in the enterprise as the ever growing need to be cost conscience continues.

Most organizations are looking for a single solution to manage multiple sites -- whether they be microsites for marketing campaigns or fully fledged websites. This means multi-site management capabilities are becoming a critical differentiator for Web CMS solutions.

But not all multi-site management capabilities are created equal. We took a look at the multi-site management capabilities of three of the most popular open source web content management systems and this is what we found.

Acquia, the subscription based service and software company behind the popular open source web content management system Drupal, has made some new announcements that mean a change in management and exciting new things for the future of Acquia and Drupal.

The registration booths don't open for another 10 days and the moment of truth for what is being called the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny is not until 11:30am on March 16th. Nevertheless, the teams competing for the prized moment of Web CMS glory have had their sleeves rolled-up for a while now, and their competition websites have just been turned in and are now available for public viewing and, of course, critiquing. 

This week's web publishing roll up focuses on the tools and tricks online publishers can employ to facilitate more readership and exposure -- and hopefully more revenue. From SEO to metrics to advertising, here's a synthesis of all that fits to click.

With some interest we read recent commentary by Drupal project founder Dries Buyaert. He was meant to be providing pundrity on the future of open source. Some interesting points include:

1. Most people interact with and/or rely on open source much more than they realize
2. Mozilla Firefox, with a supposed 20% of the browser market, is in a large part responsible for bringing the face of open source to the consumer
3. "web master role that we used to know is dead. Publishing tools and content management systems, like Drupal, replaced them"

We can agree with all that. But there are two other points that go a little squirrelly with me.

2009 brings about promise, hope and most importantly change. And change comes in the fashion of newly elected leadership for the open source Web Content Management powerhouse, Drupal.

With the New Year not quite two months underway, Drupal has gone through the process of electing new leadership to spearhead their push into the future of content management. 27 applicants, some of whom were existing members reapplying, led to six new permanent members for a total of eight on the board. This brings the number of permanent Drupal members to an impressive 30.

One of the first official demonstrations of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) came from Alfresco last December. Their Alfresco:Joomla! Integration Module enabled organizations who use Joomla for web content management to access content stored in Alfresco's content management repository. In fact Alfresco version 3 has built in CMIS capabilities, so it was only a matter of time before another open source vendor would come along and set-up their own integration module. Optaros, in association with Acquia and Alfresco has now also created a set of CMIS integration modules connecting Drupal web content management with Alfresco.

Desktop or browser-integrated blogging applications have been around for some time now and many are quite similar in function. Blogging suggestion tools that will suggest related articles, images and links based on what you are writing are also not new. But a partnership between ScribeFire and Zemanta bring the two together in an single browser add-on setup.

Stirring up the vibrant web publishing game is WoodWing, a company we haven’t mentioned in a while. The last time we spoke of them they were playing around with Alfresco and partnering for Smart Newspapers.

This time they’ve brought to the table the latest version of their flagship product, the somewhat awkward to pronounce Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform and they are building new and interesting bridges with their pluggable repository architecture. Let's take a quick look at how they're evolving the web publishing side of our landscape.