ZDNet: While open-source content-management system Drupal now underpins a huge number of websites around the world, it was created, according to its founder Dries Buytaert, "sort of by accident".
The software, which now powers 7.2 million websites, including sites for the White House, Whitehall, NASA and Greenpeace, was devised in a college dorm room in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2000.
A number of concerns have been voiced from the community about the substantial growth Acquia has achieved since its inception, the number of key contributors who are now employed by Acquia, and the subsequent influence that this allows Acquia to have on the project.
One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).
Most people in the content management world will acknowledge that seeing these five guys together in the same room is a rare event. What you may not know is that for many of these open source leaders this event was the first time they have ever met one another.
We tend to focus so much of our time on our own projects that we lose sight of what is taking place outside of our own bubble. The benefits of open source projects getting to know one another better has me thinking a lot lately about the "The Strength of Weak Ties" and the importance of getting to know your competition.
CMS Expo 2011: Founders' Panel from SilverStripe on Vimeo.
The sound quality in the above video could be improved but I think we're just lucky enough to have the video. I'm not aware of any "official video" being taken by the conference organizers so we're fortunate the SilverStripe folks who shot this video were thinking ahead.
Just started reading Drupal's Dries Buytaert's blog posting titled, Joomla vs Drupal: business models and commercial ecosystem. The article comes just a week after he attended CMS Expo and are some of his thoughts on the Drupal/Joomla! comparisons many of us do with open source CMS.
But what does the future hold? The Drupal community seems to be expanding into the enterprise, whereas the Joomla community is expanding into, well ... Drupal. All the Joomla companies that I talked to at CMSExpo were in the process of taking their products and services to the Drupal market and rebranding their organizations to be cross-CMS compatible.
When time allows, I may add my own thoughts about Dries' article in this post as well as a comment over at Buytaert.net. In the meantime, please be sure to read the comments in the article (no flame war so far, yea!) as there is a lot of substance in the comment section too.
Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most part, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.
I was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.
In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.
Every year, there are some key information technology people that make mostly sound and trustworthy predictions for the coming year. I'll be updating this page through the week with links to these visions of what we may expect in 2009. My own thoughts and vision for 2009 and CMS Report will come later in another post (I am not worthy to place my own comments here).
Content Management and Social Publishing Predictions
Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead) - Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom
Ryan Thrash (MODx) - Evolution and Revolution
Open Source
Dave Rosenberg (Co-founder of MuleSource) - Open source as paid software
Assorted Tech Gurus - The Future of Open Source
Technology and Information Technology
Joe Zuccaro - Twitter, Blogging, Open Source CMS (Drupal), Government
Assorted Analysts - Cloud Computing, Windows 7, Collaboration, Patents
If you come across a posting regarding 2009 by an IT leader, please feel free to leave a link in the comment section below.
"An objective without strategy, or a strategy without execution remains a dream."
-Dries Buytaert, Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom, "Contributing back to Drupal", Buytaert.net.
I'm doing a little morning reading at some of my favorite Internet spots. A couple of this morning's IT related posts that caught my attention:
CMS Critic posted a good interview of Drupal Founder, Dries Buytaert. During the past couple months, Dries and a few other open source project leaders have graciously offered to me their time for an interview. Unfortunately, I've been so busy that I've delayed the interviews until I have the time to do it right.
Another Milestone for Acquia, the start-up company founded by Drupal's Dries Buytaert. I've been reviewing the Acquia products for a couple months and will post my thoughts on it at a later date.
After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my! Complete Story
