Drupal - Glue For Your Web Software
Have you heard of Drupal? Have you heard the name ‘Dries’? Well, if you’ve been involved in web software in the past five years, I suspect you have. If not, let me introduce both.
Drupal is one of today’s rising stars in the very crowded content management arena. An open source ‘social software’ platform, the product was originally developed by Dries Buytaert - now CTO and co-founder of Acquia, and is regularly found on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in the highly coveted ‘visionary’ sector.
The software, while categorized as a social publishing solution, is regularly used as a Web CMS at both small start-ups and multi-nationals. The software touts flexibility, a friendly user interface1, a highly extensible architecture, and the most active open source community on the net. Good stuff.
Tell me more.
Available since 2001, Drupal, now at a 6.x release level, is written in PHP, uses a back-end database, a templating engine, and integrates with most any web accessible service, be it within the enterprise or available via the Internet. (By the way,"The Web is Dead" :-)
In regards to adoption, Wikipedia states that Drupal is the back-end CMS for at least 1% of all websites worldwide (7M+). That’s no small feat, and all indications are that this ‘1% er’ is going to continue to dominate. A few prime examples:
- The White House
- NASA
- Sony Music
- Major League Soccer
- Lifetime Networks
- Levi Straus
- Thomson Reuters
- Harvard, MIT and Bently
- Seventh Generation
Why so popular?
Well, for starters, the platform is flexible and easily extended. It uses open source at its core (PHP and either MySQL or Postgress), and was architected to support a ‘snap in/module’ strategy that allows for incremental functionality. To this end, we find over 5,800 Drupal modules currently available, helping to speed integration with almost any web-services enabled software. (Salesforce.com, Constant Contact, Exact Target, MailChimp, Eloqua, HubSpot, LDAP services, proprietary products with WSI, etc.)
On the front end, the software provides access to a WYWIWYG editor helping non-technical users easily create and update content. The web-based user and administration UI is easy to use (once you get the hang of it) and supports role-based access to various features and functions.
Ok, so, you’re team has developed a new solution that captures your unmatched understanding of a given business challenge, and hopefully will ultimately have millions and millions of users taking advantage of it. (Well, at least a few thousand, right?)
You’ve spent lots of time and money getting the back-end in place. You selected a high performance open source database (Postgress, MySQL, VoltDB, etc.), you’ve leveraged JBoss to build out a scalable, workflow engine that captures all those business rules and processes that share your value proposition, and you’ve architected the overall solution so that it can be delivered either through the Cloud or through a localized implementation.
To do all this, you’d hired the world’s best engineers, who frankly, have little to no interest in the front-end. They typically view this tier as ‘something any joe programmer’ can take care of. Well, we know this is not really true, and we know a well designed and managed front-end is as challenging to implement as the back end.
To make the experience meaningful, and to take advantage of different market segments, your software needs to take on some of the characteristics of the chameleon. Your software needs to change with its environment affording your product management and marketing team the opportunity to package and configure your core services to meet a given market’s needs.
Within that market, the solution needs to be customizable to a given client’s needs.
