Recent Blog Entries

The Complete Archive

Trends by Vendor

Web Content Management Trends

Enterprise Portals Trends

ECM Trends

Web Analytics Trends

Enterprise Search Trends

SharePoint Trends

Digital & Media Asset Management Trends

XML & Component Content Management Trends

E-mail Archiving & Management Trends

Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration Trends

The Web CMS Report 2009 looks at... Drupal

"It is rare that a Drupal implementation team does not utter the words "there is a module that does that." However, it does take some time for the module developers to catch up to the architectural changes introduced by each major release of the core. Module developers are responsible for testing and giving honest descriptions on the state of their modules (such as alpha, beta, and what version of the core the module is compatible with). A big part of the version compatibility issues with modules is that module developers do not have standard ways to interact with Drupal resources so they write their own database queries and directly access the file system. When the Drupal core changes the way it stores its data, modules break. There is no central body to evaluate modules or state what version they are compatible with. Unfortunately, the best information about the quality of a module is still usually word of mouth by the Drupal specialists who are constantly experimenting with new modules as they are released. "

More about The Web CMS Report 2009

NEW at CMS Watch

The Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration Report 2009: This newly updated research critically evaluates 27 Enterprise Social Software and Collaboration packages... Read more

The Enterprise Portals Report 2009: This newly updated research critically evaluates 12 Enterprise Portals products head-to-head... Read more

The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2009: This newly updated research critically evaluates 20 DAM suppliers head-to-head... Read more

 

 

A caution about Drupal as a social software platform

13-May-2008   --  

The open source package Drupal is one of the few social publishing platforms built on top of a longstanding Web CM (WCM) system. It has a strong foundation with a very flexible taxonomy system which -- along with thousands of 3rd-party modules -- enables you to assemble social publishing applications.

However, these modules could be your biggest problem as well because many times, module upgrades do not keep pace with Drupal upgrades. Even though Drupal has released version 6.2, many of the more popular modules are still on 5.x. These include Organic groups (for building communities or groups), MySite (module for MyPage or MyYahoo type functionality), Panels (module for creating more flexible layouts) and Views (module for creating flexible lists of content) -- all modules that are necessary for building such social publishing applications.

Meanwhile, some of the problem related to 3rd-party modules could be reduced with the new firm Acquia announcing a commercial Drupal version which will include support for many of these 3rd party modules. Even though Acquia has received a bit of publicity (and VC funding), the first release of "Carbon" (its commercial offering) won't be released until the second half of this year.

So if you are planning to employ Drupal for your social software project, pay special attention to the modules that are required and test them thoroughly on Drupal. It is quite possible that you do not need any of these 3rd party modules because Drupal also includes many modules like Blog and Forums in its core. But if you do need external modules like these, your best bet would probably be to go for Drupal 5.x (and the same holds good for those looking to upgrade from 5.x to 6.x as well). As we continue to research social software in the enterprise, look for more details in these pages on Drupal and competing platforms.

- Submitted by: Apoorv Durga, Guest Analyst

All CMS Channel Trends

Join the conversation

Wondering about CMS Watch research? Sign up to receive free samples of any of our products.