[Evangelism] The State of Drupal
Matt Hamilton
matth at netsight.co.uk
Mon Nov 23 15:10:06 UTC 2009
Scott,
This is an amazing panel discussion. There was meant to be
something similar at IMS this year, but it got dropped, which was a
shame. I'm still not entirely sure the organisers themselves 'get'
Open Source. Having a quick look at the OSS vendors/projects listed
for IMS there will be: Plone, eZpublish, Squiz, and Day (whose product
is not OSS, but they contribute to a lot of OSS components they use,
mainly Apache stuff).
I've got a meeting setup with Janus Boye from Jboye who does quite a
bit of work for CMSWatch (they wrote the Plone entry for CMSWatch's
reports) so similar to below, if anyone has any specific info they
think I should be mentioning then let me know. I'm going to mainly
talk about the Plone 4 roadmap and general Plone ecosystem.
-Matt
On 23 Nov 2009, at 14:51, Scott Paley wrote:
> Steve - this is fantastic. Thanks!
>
> Next Wednesday (12/2) I'll be sitting on a panel at Gilbane Boston
> entitled "Open Source CMS Powwow", as the "Plone representative".
> Others on the panel will include Mitch Pirtle, the founder of
> Joomla, Jay Batson, a co-founder of Acquia, and Ian Howells, the CMO
> of Alfresco. In other words, it's a pretty strong panel (always fun
> to be the "weakest link!") Obviously I know a lot more about Plone
> than the other 3 platforms, so this kind of information is extremely
> helpful. It's interesting to see how Drupal stuggles with many of
> the same challenges as Plone and is not some "magic bullet".
>
> http://gilbaneboston.com/conference_program.html#W9
>
> If anybody out there wants to "arm" me with additional information
> about what you perceive to be the strengths of Plone relative to the
> other platforms, please send an email my way. I'm not as interested
> in the specific ways in which Plone is better than Joomla as I am
> about where Plone really shines. I have my own ideas on this, but
> would love feedback.
>
> The stated agenda of the talk is, "Just a few short years ago many
> organizations wouldn't think of implementing an open source content
> management system. Today, thousands of major global companies have
> implemented solutions like Drupal, Joomla!, Plone and Alfresco, to
> name a few. In this session, Joe Bachana, Founder and CEO of DPCI,
> has invited major luminaries from these four open source CMS
> projects to help attendees better differentiate each system from the
> others. Particular attention will be paid to calling out the
> strengths of each system. The session will also pay close attention
> to any feedback or lingering criticism in the market that open
> source CMS platforms still face."
>
> The moderator followed up privately to let the panelists know that,
> "With regard to the tone of the session, I'd like it to be
> constructive -- I don't have a particular interest in declaiming
> which project is better than the other. However, there are clear
> differentiators on platforms (LAMP, Python, Java/J2EE) as well as
> functional focus for each that can and should be called out, and we
> should endeavor to do so. Further, I would like to leave ample time
> to discuss the criticisms of the open-source platform and
> communities, since there is still a great deal of it out there."
>
> Thanks all,
>
> Scott Paley
> Abstract Edge
>
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Steve McMahon <steve at dcn.org> wrote:
> While at the Non-Profit SW Dev Summit, I had the opportunity to
> attend a couple of Drupal panels (new to Drupal, and what's new with
> Drupal). Drupal had their A team at the summit (a couple of core
> devs and several evangelists) to do the talks. I wanted to pass on a
> few things on what I observed. Share as appropriate.
>
> 1) Drupal is also having the framework vs product debate. From what
> I heard, the "framework" side is definitely winning. Many Drupal
> integrators are actually demanding that some new, friendlier UI in
> the Drupal 7 preview be rolled back because they feel it undermines
> their flexibility as integrators. Drupal 7 continues to be a micro-
> core product that is not really suitable for use out of the box. The
> Drupal folks emphasize that no inexperienced person should think
> they can integrate Drupal by themselves (for more than a blog), as
> they need to gain a lot of experience as to which modules really
> work together.
>
> 2) There is no migration path for add-on modules between 6 and 7.
> The core devs emphasize that it will be a rare 6 module that does
> not need a complete rewrite to become a 7 module. The integrators in
> the audience moaned loudly on receiving this news, and complained
> that this was awful for them. The core devs replied that the new
> APIs would make add on modules more secure and reliable.
>
> 3) Drupal is still very complex for end users. I don't think they
> really differentiate between users and site managers. Positioning a
> node in the content hierarchy still requires intimate knowledge of
> how Drupal works (or add on modules that organize portions of the
> tree). The ideal Drupal install is probably either small enough that
> a single site admin is not a bottleneck, or large enough that
> several site admins can be well trained.
>
> 4) Permissions and roles are still pretty much global, and workflow
> is rudimentary. No ACLs. The organic groups module remedies some of
> that, but there was skepticism about whether or not it could be
> ported to 7.
>
> 5) The CCK (content creation kit) is now pretty much integrated into
> 7, and is really pretty cool in its ability to allow site admins to
> add fields to content types TTW. On the other hand, they don't have
> a round trip story, and I heard a couple of conversations, that
> translated to Plone-speak, amounted to "we need something like
> generic setup to handle repeatable deployments."
>
> 6) Real-life Drupal is actually very resource intensive. The
> audience was told that they could do something like a blog on a
> cheapo host, but that a real deployment with multiple content
> authors would require a dedicated server or large virtual slice.
>
> 7) They are still, out-of-the-box, a great blogging platform, and if
> you're using Drupal as a "news to the home page site" with a few
> static pages, it's easy and fast to configure.
>
> 8) The party line on Acquia is that what's good for Acquia and Dries
> is good for Drupal. I saw not a hint of discomfort with that.
>
> 9) A somewhat contradictory pair of party lines: "it's easy to find
> PHP programmers, and they're inexpensive, therefore PHP is the place
> to be" and "Don't even think of using a PHP programmer with less
> than 3 years Drupal experience to do any customization."
>
> 10) Taxonomy was "never meant to provide site structure" and is now
> deprecated as a way to build nav trees. The "right" way to do it is
> with the new relations fields, which allow you to pick nodes as
> parents/children.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
> --
> Scott Paley | ABSTRACT EDGE
>
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Matt Hamilton matth at netsight.co.uk
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