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?

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 ;)

huh?

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:huh?

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...

Which CMS would this be now?

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?

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.

Domain Should be Owned by the Group

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:Domain Should be Owned by the Group

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.

Drupal development

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).

CMS?

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)

joomla

...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...

Old news!!!

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 ?

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 (everything is a string! Of course! or a number)

Do you want to work with a system where the main developers aggressively state that they will pay no attention to backward compatibilty? Everything changes from 4.6 to 4.7. That nice module you're using may not work in a week, if no one can be bothered to upgrade it. A common occurance.

Do you want to use a system where the database isn't even relational?

Just check out the Drupal site, and check out how many "solutions" are scraps of code pasted here and there, kludges and hacks. That's going to be supported and upgraded really easily. Oh, and they have so much scorn when they say how easy it is to "learn php." Yes, way to learn about software development, kludges and hacks.

How about the flammage in the Drupal discussions, and the fact that any criticism is given the silent treatment.

How about a system that bills itself "Community plumbing." This may be the best reason to use Drupal, because clearly the attitude is all about the "wizard" programmers, and the "users" at their mercy.

Then go Drupal! It's working out very well for the core developers.

Otherwise, there are better languages that support better, more tuned libraries for getting things done.

10 Million PHP/MySQL Apps and still growing

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.

Spend it on documentation

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.

Re:Language? PHP?

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

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

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

Re:This is what Drupal looks like

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:This is what Drupal looks like

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:This is what Drupal looks like

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:This is what Drupal looks like

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:This is what Drupal looks like

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 I run a web site that we've made entirely geo-aware. A visitor tells us where they are and we only show them data that is near them (and data where location is not relevant, such as help screens and open forums). Drupal was not built to do this - I should say Drupal was not designed to meet this specific need. Impressively we pulled this off with only a single line change in Drupal core, and that was to replace the default RSS feed on the front page because we needed ours to be an RSS feed specific to the user's locality. Everything else was done through the proper extension patterns in Drupal. We are very pleased with Drupal as a framework.

Drupal can look pretty too - we are very happy with the degree to which we could theme Drupal.

Scott

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