Earlier this month, NetSquared was generous enough to fund my attendance at the Lullabot Drupal Intensive workshop in Providence, Rhode Island. Drupal is a free, open-source content management system that allows non-technical users to update your site and is capable of powering blogs, community sites, action-oriented campaigns and social networks along the lines of MySpace and Facebook. Lullabot, a Drupal development firm that involved in much of the Drupal development, has a keen interest in Drupal for nonprofits.

Well, it's been a couple days and the news has been on the front page of drupal.org, but I am very excited by the fact that the Drupal 6 will officially support OpenID. It's taken a lot of work, so it feels really really nice to have it done. I wanted to post to (hopefully) answer some common questions that I've received and seen about the module:

The Seattle Drupal Users Group met for a Drupal Camp yesterday. It was an all day affair, with Drupal developers hiding out in one room learning about such things as theming and jviews with Robin Barre and noobs like me in a larger room with Gregory Heller from CivicActions doing a so-called Barn Raising. Donald Lobo from CiviCRM also happened to be there and we took adantage of the opportunity to sign a contract and review the specs for the CiviCRM component of the Kabissa African Voices project. It feels good to be implementing CiviCRM at long last, after years of planning and false starts with other vendors, and I very much like the way we are doing it.

I. Is Drupal similar to other CMS?

1. Giving a point by point comparison of Drupal and traditional content management systems (CMS) like PHPNuke, PostNuke or XOOPs is a tricky and difficult undertaking because of two reasons: First, a comparative matrix of features will not accurately tell the tale. Second, Drupal’s impact is more on the back-end and can only be fully appreciated by web programmers/developers.

These are my notes from John Jones‘ presentation “Drupal for Education” at the TTT Conference in Wichita, Kansas, on 12 June 2008.

Drupal gets considerable praise for being versatile, flexible, and open. At the same time, it is often criticized for being difficult to configure, with a large learning curve even for seasoned developers. So given the criticism, why do I use it? And why do I recommend it to clients? This article provides an overview of Drupal, and in doing so, explains why I stake my business on it.

Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, is using Drupal for his website at http://www.mikebloomberg.com/.

In a recent Slaw comment, Connie asked if someone would write something about Drupal. Subsequent comments from Patrick and Simon gave brief summaries, but I thought I’d go a bit further, and try to relay some of the basics surrounding this type of web software.

Briefly, Drupal is an open source CMS, written for the LAMP stack, which is modular in design. What does this mean? Well, let’s start with a couple definitions.

The Need

The Archdiocese Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (Archdiocese) wanted to use its Antiochian.org web site to promote awareness and understanding of the Orthodox Faith and the work of the Archdiocese.  They needed a web site to serve as a tool for effective communication to various audiences, including persons within the Archdiocese, other churches, the general public, and the press.

My take on Drupal's learning curve: