Drupal Gets Non-Profit Backing

DrupalAssociation writes "Drupal, the popular and widely used CMS, now has the backing of a non-profit association. Having grown in size and scope for the last six years, the Drupal software project needs more structured support with infrastructure, marketing and funding. The Drupal Association will help with these needs but will not be directly involved with Drupal software development. Donations are now being solicited. Plans for Corporate and individual membership are being drawn and will be announced at a later time. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and the President of the Association, announced the Association on Drupal.org today."

Re:Which CMS would this be now?

[DrupalAssociation]

Actually, I (Robert Douglass) agree. CMS is an overloaded term. I would have rather used "web application framework", which is what I use Drupal as. It's just that CMS (as in content management system) seems to be what people most readily lable Drupal as being, and I didn't want to distract attention from the project's great news with an article on the semantics or value of the acronym CMS.

Re:Domain Should be Owned by the Group

[Thanatopsis]

It reflects Dries age - he's unwilling to cede control of the domain. (And didn't bother to register drupal.com). He's got founderitis which isn't surprising really - it's his first project. Drupal itself is incredible difficult to maintain as evidenced by sloppy coding practices (No test suite for commits [thalasar.com] anyone). Most people using Drupal would be better off using Movable Type [thalasar.com]

10 Million PHP/MySQL Apps and still growing

[Qbertino]

One really anoying thing with PHP/MySQL Solutions is that there's so many of them. And a lot are so crappy it's unbelievable.

Here's my breakdown of systems worth mentioning and that I've worked with/administrated/looked into:

Typo3 [typo3.org] - the scariest heap of PHP code ever. 7 years of historically grown code mess. Don't even think of looking at the current data model. The operating system of OSS CMSes, the first to sport a proper GUI and an own configuration language and heavy Ajax use in the backend (before it was called Ajax). Large community. Despite the mess it is, its performance requirements and it's notably difficult install process, it is a very powerfull, flexible, secure and stable system. Usefull extensions number in the thousands and it is one of the bridgeheads of OSS into the corporate world and powers a notable amout of large scale / high profile / heavy traffic websites. It's extremly popular in web agencies throughout the german speaking world (probably because it had a german backend from early on) and basically has allready grown beyond critical mass in Europe. Reddot [reddot.com] regularly pee their pants when they hear 'Typo3'. The Webagencies using it as their prime tool are actually called Typo3 agencies sometimes. You can make a fair living as a Typo3 expert in Germany. There's a regular magazine on Typo3 (some articles in english as free PDF available: http://www.yeebase.com/home/ [yeebase.com] ) and 20+ german books about it.

If you want to dive into an OSS CMS for good it's not the worst choice. If T3 doesn't have it, you probably don't need it. However the learning curve is steep and it's a german-style overengineered monster, despite being initially built by a danish guy. You have been warned.

Note: The T5 team (a subgroup of the core T3 community) is currently rebuilding an entirely new architecture from scratch and plans to be finished with the new branch (Typo3 5.0) in about 2 years. Which actually keeps me interested in the project.

EZ Publish [ez.no] - same league as T3 yet smaller community. Backend less scary. Probably less features.

Joomla [joomla.org] - descendant of Mambo, factually it's successor. My and many others favourite. The first turnkey OSS CMS that doesn't look like shit. Hence the raging success. Installation is a breeze. Considered a strong competitor to Typo3 in Germany, despite lacking a German backend. Which means a lot, because Typo3 owns Germany (see above). 1000+ Extensions and Plugins and many German books on it and a magazine aswell - which went broke after 3 issues though :-) .

PHP CMS [phpcms.de] - yes it's called that way. Very small, simple, no DB needed. My first. Not very big but good enough for small sites.

Drupal [drupal.org] seems to much between the above and the Wordpress/b2evolution Blog-park to be of interest to me. I've heard alot about it, he community is very active and a lot of people in the T3 and Joomla Camp accept it as one of theirs. However, there's only so much systems you can look into before it get's pointless. Drupal may be worth a try aswell for those who are interested.