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."

Non profit and donations?

[celardore]

So a non-profit organisation wants my donations? I'd feel much better if a non-profit organisation was soliciting my donations. Or calling it a subscription ;)

Re:

[celardore]

The key word is 'donation'. If you're donating, you figure you're doing it for a good reason. Donating to the non-profit organisations like Oxfam, Red Cross, et cetera is cool. As is donating to volunteer run software projects. Would you feel as good if you were asked for a donation from the Microsoft Foundation? - donate to encourage your next version of Windows? Just an example....

Re:

[dedazo]

Would you feel as good if you were asked for a donation from the Microsoft Foundation? - donate to encourage your next version of Windows?

Wha...? You mean Mrs. Miriam Abachi is not related to Bill Gates? Now you tell me!

Re:

[alienmole]

I have no clue what you're talking about. You wrote:

So a non-profit organisation wants my donations? I'd feel much better if a non-profit organisation was soliciting my donations. Or calling it a subscription ;)

So what's the problem with the non-profit backing Drupal? Or with the wording they used somewhere?

huh?

[User 956]

The Drupal Association will help with these needs but will not be directly involved with Drupal software development. Donations are now being solicited.

So my donation to Drupal will not be used to suppord development of Drupal? what?

Re:

[jo42]

the Drupal software project needs more structured support with infrastructure, marketing and funding.

Someone figured out:

3) Profit!!!

Re:

[DrupalAssociation]

The bloody split is exactly what Drupal wants to avoid.

Re:huh?

[DrupalAssociation]

Right. It will go to support the infrastructure of Drupal.org (and related sites, like http://groups.drupal.org/ [drupal.org] events, marketing and infrastructure. The Association may also sponsor Drupal related development (to improve the release system, or make a new Drupal.org theme, for example), but the Association is *not* involved in the development of the Drupal software. This is an important distinction and is legally binding. What it means is that the Association Board of Directors won't be voting on which features make Drupal core, or whether we should support Sybase but not Oracle etc...

Re:

[fymidos]

Could you define marketing? It is my experience that marketing has a great influence in the development of the software ...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It is my experience that marketing has a great influence in the development of the software ...

Java

Re:

[drinkypoo]

So my donation to Drupal will not be used to suppord development of Drupal? what?

It might, but that has not yet been decided. If that's where you want the money to go, then don't spend it. They plan to spend money on outreach/proselytization so far (mostly in the form of travel.)

Re:

[DrupalAssociation]

Actually, building out Drupal.org infrastructure and and organizing conferences (as in, renting rooms) are higher priority items than paying for individuals' travel. But as of yet, no purchasing decisions have been made, so the current Board of Directors has no track record spending money.

Which CMS would this be now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only are there a dozen things labeled "CMS", even the ones that are supposedly the same (such as Code Management Systems) disagree on what a CMS really is or does.

I just steer away from that sort of thing on principle....

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:

[celardore]

I regard Drupal as a framework. I'm very lazy, but I like to have a blog - mainly for myself. I don't care ever so much if it never gets read, but I know it does by a few people. I use Drupal because I know I can expand it if I want, I can add my own code in fairly easily. At a time I can be bothered too. I use it as a blog for now, as a frontend for my site. If I want to add more in later, I will.

Thanks.

Re:

[/dev/trash]

Yeah good luck with that.

Re:

[Realistic_Dragon]

At work they keep saying CMS and I can only assume it stands for Crap Management System.

Re:

[PitaBred]

Yup. You've gotta keep your crap in order, from largest to smallest...

Re:

[Jack Action]

I prefer TCO:

Turd Collection Organizer.

Re:

[CopaceticOpus]

I read a comment once on drupal.org which described Drupal as a "CMS construction kit." I've found it to be a very apt description. Drupal isn't meant to be a working CMS out of the box so much as it's meant to provide a framework for a programmer to quickly create a customized CMS.

Re:

[hmanonymous]

I agree. The article is defective. I tried Wikipedia entry for CMS, and am no clearer on what this is. Looks like a typical FUM to me.

Domain Should be Owned by the Group

[garcia]

From their FAQ [drupal.org]:

Why does Dries, and not the Drupal Association, hold the domain name?

Dries has always retained access to the domain name, and has a proven track history of being responsible with its care. The Drupal Association as yet is unestablished, and would represent a great risk to place something so important to the community in its hands, at least at this stage.

In my limited experience with non-profits and owning/running a website that goes along with them, it is in the best interest of everyone that the holdings be owned by the association rather than individuals tied to the association. Simply put, regardless of how someone has dealt with the ownership in the past, if anything goes south, the first response is sometimes to spite them and yank the holdings and then you're screwed.

Operating the business behind the domain is one thing but having full ownership of it is another. If the group is serious about this being the face of Drupal, I suggest that they go into it the entire way before something similar to the recent ESR [slashdot.org] drama and they pull out after years of support.

Re:

[DrupalAssociation]

This was arguably the hardest decision in the formation of the Association.

Re:

[garcia]

This was arguably the hardest decision in the formation of the Association.

Do you mean that Dries wouldn't give up ownership? If he's really behind it, he would have.

As a Drupal user (who has donated money in the past) I am interested in knowing if I should give money to the cause via the Association or not.

Re:

[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]

Re:

[garcia]

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.

This may be true and IMHO, if the Association wants to succeed, they should work on attempting to persuade Dries from his current opinion as it's extremely shortsighted.

The rest of your comment is trollfood and shouldn't have been included.

Re:

[Thanatopsis]

Not troll food my friend Drupal's development practices are driven by one guy and he's no Linus.
From the Drupal site,

http://drupal.org/node/11521 [drupal.org]

"Drupal is currently lacking some test suite to be run by developers before submitting important patches. The simpletest module shows some great promise but it is unfortunately not widely adopted yet and there aren't many tests written. See here for a tutorial on how to write tests for your module.

The following setup isn't really a test suite but it is a start to a

Re:Domain Should be Owned by the Group

[GrouchoMarx]

As a Drupal developer for the past year and a half, I can't disagree more. Yes, Dries disagrees with major contributors often, and has shot down my ideas at times too, but on the whole the high standards that he (and the other committers and core contributors, of whom there are many) holds to have kept the system moving in the right direction. How many open source systems out there do have full coverage test suites for everything? A minority, I wager.

And of course Drupal's very architecture, hyper-modular like Eclipse and even more plugin-based than OSS darling Firefox, encourages pushing functionality out to contrib modules where it can be developed more rapidly and without weighing down the core system with extra code (read: extra bugs).

I don't know what the plans are as far as trademark and domain name ownership long term, as I'm not involved with the Association directly. I agree that it would be a good place for such things, but it was only just founded. Give it time to sort out the legal details. I know a few of the other people who are on the Association's board of directors, and I know they are not short-sighted people.

Re:

[caluml]

I use Drupal because it works, and it also works on Postgres. I didn't want to have to install MySQL just to have a piece of blog software that I would occasionally write stuff on.

Well no shit sherlock

[/dev/trash]

You nailed it. Drupal is Dries's and never will be anyone elses. Look thru the forums and count the number of times people have come up with ways to work around the bugs and then right before it gets committed, Dries pops in with 'Coding style sucks, this is slow, why do we need this, it works for me."

Drupal development

[UnConeD]

What bizarro world do you live in?

Yes, Drupal maintains high code standards, which are frequently a reason not to commit patches. All these practices, as well as detailed guidelines in terms of security, API usage, theming, localization, ... are published on the web site. Dries himself frequently runs benchmarks on Drupal and identifies areas where a patch can be improved. The community also polices itself when it comes to contributed modules, and tries to avoid overlap between them.

Besides Dries, there are 4 other people with core commit access (including me). Two of those were added about a year ago, matching our increased growth. They are respected community members who have demonstrated fair and balanced judgement and excellent technical skills. We all maintain the same standards, and give each patch a fair review. For the Drupal 5.0 release, almost 500 people submitted patches. Several of those affected key parts of Drupal's core. Many of those have been and are still being developed as contributed modules that are slowly seeping into core. For example, Drupal 5 includes user-definable content types, which was incorporated from CCK.module.

When a patch is rejected, there is always a good reason given. Most people however forget that Drupal is used and deployed in a variety of scenarios, and that what goes for them doesn't necessary apply to others. This is why we try to make sure that as many parts of Drupal can be altered, extended or removed by modules, so that nobody needs to create a fork (which causes update/maintenance hassles).

Re:

[alienmole]

You nailed it. Similarly, Linux is Linus' and never will be anyone else's. No wait -- on second thought, don't be a moron. If you don't recognize an incredibly successful project when you see it, the fault is with you, not with the people who made it what it is.

Re:

[/dev/trash]

It's easier to get patches into the mainline kernel than it is Drupal.

CMS?

[skintigh2]

I love it when people drop random TLAs (three letter acronyms) that hardly anyone has ever seen and not bother to define them.

It's even better when they have multiple definitions.

It's even better when none of them actually fit, since the website says Drugal is a content managment platform (CMP)

Re:

[Nos.]

Hardly anyone? CMS (Content Management System) is used quite a bit out there. I put it in google and the 2nd hit (a stock was the first) was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_sy stem [wikipedia.org] I would say that a Content Management System and a Content Managemet Platform are probably pretty similar.

Re:

[DrupalAssociation]

Yes, PHP. It officially supports MySQL and PostgreSQL database backends. Other db engines are possible.

joomla

[seandiggity]

...if Joomla doesn't release 1.5 soon, I may be spending a lot more time with Drupal. I hope this is a step in the right direction for them...

Sitting on the fence (Re:joomla)

[LaoziSailor]

Have you tried Joomla! 1.5 Beta [joomla.org]?

I have been sitting on the fence for some time. The kind of discussion going on now is tilting me towards the Joomla camp considering that I am not a coding expert anymore.

Re:

[seandiggity]

Well the site I work on (primarily) gets a high amount of traffic, so I didn't want to risk the beta...when we were first going to switch to Joomla, I thought about it but the main problem is waiting for the developers of the components, modules, and mambots to update their stuff.

Joomla is nice and I've worked on a few custom modules and components (not ready for release yet). The 1.5 delay is really getting to me, however, because I'm becoming more and more reliant on code based on 1.0.12 From what I

Code is... (Was:This is what Drupal looks like)

[webgrappa]

If WP [wordpress.org] says that "Code is poetry" and TXP [textpattern.com] that "Code is pottery"... for Drupal what is Code like? ;)

Re:

[nuzak]

Wordpress gets no love from me either. A good chunk of any WP site's functionality is actually embedded code in the theme. If you change themes around, you break features. Isn't that special?

Re:

[Raenex]

What do you recommend then?

Re:

[RonDiggity]

I thought about switching my photoblog over to Ruby on Rails when that craze hit, but I could never stray too far away from Drupal's linear simplicity. Everything is where I expect it to be, and is organized in a matter that I like. Many high-volume sites like TheOnion run on Drupal.

Re:

[tbone1]

We used Drupal to create a new site [indymoms.com] within two months. My boss and I did All Things Drupal, let the designers work their magic, then integrated the two. It was pretty nice, I have to say. Not perfect, of course, but this old Perl monk had to re-examine his opinion of what PHP could do.

Re:This is what Drupal looks like

[truthsearch]

That's not part of the platform. That's some random theme you picked. There are themes written well and themes not written well. Dries and others are extremely picky with the code allowed into the drupal core.

I have intimate knowledge of the drupal code and can easily say the parent is not at all informative. Drupal modules and core have no code that looks anything like this.

Re:

[nuzak]

> That's some random theme you picked.

Okay, to be fair, it's the code example picked out from the PHPTemplate manual in the Drupal docs. I will grant that it's got good docs. I am left wondering where the "template" part comes in however.

Re:

[truthsearch]

I never use PHPTemplate. I write themes as regular drupal modules, which are functional instead of template-style. They cleanly break the code into separate page, node, comment, etc. functions. Data is passed into each function as objects or arrays and a string of HTML is passed back. For PHP it's about as clean as code can be when it needs to be blended with HTML. The rest of drupal looks nothing like the theming code in the sense there is little to no HTML.

Re:

[krelian]

Would you explain to a hobbyist programmer what exactly is wrong with that code? I've actually browsed through drupal's code and it seemed pretty well organized and easy to understand to me. Cant comment about the quality though...

Re:

[dscruggs]

I've been using it for 18 months and never work with code like that. That's simple template code, more suitable for dabblers and graphic designers. Drupal actually has multiple template rendering engines that allow you to make a page look like whatever you want. Here are a few examples:

http://www.yourmtb.com/ [yourmtb.com]
http://www.yourclimbing.com/ [yourclimbing.com]
http://www.theonion.com/ [theonion.com]
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ [spreadfirefox.com] (yes, really)

Re:

[greenveneer]

That's what a .template file looks like within Drupal's default (since 4.7) theme engine, PHPTemplate. That is hardly what all of Drupal code looks like - in fact very little reads as PHP embedded in HTML, most of it is pure PHP.

Drupal is a really great application framework, and as a framework it takes a little effort to learn how to flex and expand. I'll agree that it is not for everybody. But when you dig into that framework and grasp it, you can pull off some pretty impressive things.

A friend and

Old news!!!

[dolmen.fr]

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and the President of the Association, announced the Association on Drupal.org today.

Yes. But he had already announced it on sunday at FOSDEM [fosdem.org].

Do you really want to Drupal ?

[jmcdood]

Do you want such a high level framework? To see things always not quite doing what you want, to always have to do complex upgrades at the last minute when a new exploit is found?

Do you want to invest in a framework where there's no real api (just convention, that can't be enforced reliably), no standard practices like unit tests, a language (PHP) that is under constant flux, the developers are always arguing over whether they should actually use things like encapsulation or just keep on with arrays (everyth

Re:

[truthsearch]

I've been using Drupal for years and could not disagree more. I was on the developer's mailing list for a long time helping out people new to the code. I contributed a few modules. I stuck with Drupal after trying many many other options. None were better written (for PHP). Most other projects do not pay as much attention to the platform aspect of their software. And most other systems aren't as easy or flexible enough to add modules.

BTW, if a module you like isn't supported in 4.7, keep on using 4.6.

Re:

[jmcdood]

Disagree with what?

You can stick with older versions for a little while, but the whole point is to have modules available, as soon as x.x+1 comes out you no longer have that advantage. And you can't test or support modules because there is no real API or tests. And after a while, your older version starts to have no support so you're better off taking it offline.

Glad it is working out for you, but maybe its just because of your personal investment.

Re:

[truthsearch]

You've got it backwards. I made the personal investment (and financial investment) because it works out for me. I've built quite a few sites with Drupal. It's got a great API. Once I've got a site up there's little reason to upgrade because the site's built and doesn't usually require new modules.

I invest the time up front so I don't usually need new modules down the line. Therefore a site can stay with one Drupal version for years. At least that's my experience.

Re:

[jmcdood]

Again, glad it is working out for you, but one would think most sites might benefit from emerging modules, but I guess yours are just fulfilling one static requirement.

Re:

[gbobeck]

Kinda like Zope / Plone.

(ducks)

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.

Re:

[-noefordeg-]

My experience with Joomla/Mambo code base is that it's about the same level as Os-Commerce's. Which is about has bad as it can get...
Drupal is like a new breed of sysem when considering the code.

Re:

[shish]

Joomla - descendant of Mambo, factually it's successor. My and many others favourite.

Mind if I ask why? I've been looking for a CMS for a website I run; I tried several, giving them a few hours each. In the two hours I gave Joomla, I was unable to figure out how to edit the contact details bit, I couldn't see how to edit existing articles, nor how to change the layout of the page. In fact, after a couple of hours, I'd basically achieved absolutely nothing.

Then I tried Drupal; within two hours I had crea

Spend it on documentation

[deletedaccount]

If they manage to get any money the first thing they should spend it on is generating some decent documentation. The current stuff is out of date, half complete rubbish.