Drupal – Steve Burge

January 25, 2011

The Open Source Wall Revisited: Drupal and Commercial Modules

wall I’ve been on record here saying that Open Source project should focus on learning from one another rather than competing.

So it’s been interesting to see the Drupal community talking about commercial modules this week. It’s very similar to the discussion that took place in the Joomla community during 2007 and 2008. Back then I wrote a post detailing the experience of some friends and colleagues called “Hitting the Open Source Wall“.

Earlier this week an eerily similar post started the conversation in Drupal: Is it Evil to Ask For Payment?. You can follow some of the debate by following the #drupalappstore hashtag on Twitter.

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October 28, 2009
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Thoughts on Drupal and the White House Website

Saturday was the biggest event for Open Source CMS systems since 2005.

Back in February 2005 we had the launch of WordPress.com with super-easy installs and also WordPress 1.5 with changeable themes. Later in the year, Joomla split from Mambo.

On Saturday, Drupal started powering Whitehouse.gov. It’s such a big catch that it brings hugely increased credibility, not just for Drupal, but for our Open Source CMS industry in general. If you’re not bidding for your next project by saying “this kind of software powers the White House website”, you’re crazy.

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September 22, 2008
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Drupal’s Founder Tries to Emulate Red Hat

Can I pat myself on the back? 18 months ago, I asked if Drupal or Joomla could produce a company like Red Hat.

It turns out that Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert wants to do just that. At the beginning of this year, his company Acquia received $7 million in venture capital funding.

Where has that money gone? Over at Information Week, Acquia marketing VP explains:

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November 23, 2007

Drupal SEO Checklist

Looking for help improving SEO on your Drupal site? There’s a great little module available called the SEO Checklist. It provides a list of the best SEO modules for Drupal and tells you if they’re installed. If you don’t, it will give you the link to download the extra modules and then a link to enable them.

We’ve already got a Joomla version of the prelaunch checklist (membership required). I wonder if it would be worth converting it into a component format? Two quick downsides worth noting: the module doesn’t actually check to see whether anything is set up correctly – you just check the box when you think its working and also the last few check-boxes are just advertising.

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