One for Dries to add to his Drupal sites examples:
http://www.town.nederland.co.us/ (hint) yes. A Drupalsite for sure!

You see, the Netherlands LOVE Drupal and that is why we are trying to bring this love in the form of a DrupalCon to Maastricht in 2009. Be sure to checkout one of the floor plans as well.

Note: It has not been decided yet where the next DrupalCon in the EU will be held. If you feel like organising the DrupalCon 2009 in another town, please see the guidelines of the Drupal Association and get a passionate group together to tender!

Johan Janssens -the Most Valuable Person in the Joomla community- has an article on his corporate blog about a presentation he held more then 3 years ago on the second DrupalCon in Amsterdam.

When I met him a a month ago, he challenged me to recall what his message was. And I was sad to say I didn't knew anymore. Looking back at his slides a couple of thing are clear:

(RSS readers and aggregaters not seeing the embedded slide-show, please visit slideshare)

The first thing to notice is Johan was very optimistic in his roadmap. Clearly not all his goals -numbering issues apart- have not been met by the Joomla! community. By the end of 2006, Joomla! wasn't a full blown WAF like Symfony for example is. However, things Johan did not anticipate did happen; Joomla! is clearly one of the best well known CMS-es with a very very big audience! Please note that his presentation was only month after Joomla! was founded ("forked"?) so it is only logical that his goals were optimistic.

The second thing to note is that Drupal and Joomla! still think of each other -mostly and by most- as rivals. And while I did do some sessions on building bridges between both systems, I am very guilty on placing Drupal on top of Joomla!

This while we have the same problems and could (re)use each others solutions. To name a few problems that are generic for both of us and where we can learn from each other.

Now lets try to differentiate while learning from each other. Learn from each other how to deal with GPL violations, learn setting up local "associations", leanr and share patching exploits and learn to love.

Note: During a recent session I had with Johan, the question was asked what I think Drupal could learn from Joomla. I answered "marketing". And Johan was amazed since he wanted to give the same answer on what Joomla! could learn from Drupal. One year ago, Joomla! was clearly in the lead when it came down to market the product. However, since one year, I think Drupal has better press then Joomla!, so we were both right.

Recently I saw that the Groenlinks.nl site is running Drupal. Grenlinks (greenleft, (wiki-entry) is a left winged political party in the Netherlands. GroenLinks is the party behind the Motie Vendrk (Dutch) that states that if an Open Source en proprietary product are equally good, the government has to choose the Open Source product.(Yes, we have to make Open Source products /worse/ to get picked above proprietary software ).

By itself, the site GroenLinks is not big and does not need to be mentioned here for running Drupal. However, it is a good sign. A good sign since most semi-public bodies in the Netherlands choose local CMS-es up to now. There is not a country in the world with so many CMS-es as the Netherlands (Trideon, Smartsite, Greenvalley, MMBase etc). "Koop Nederlandse Waar" ("Buy Dutch Products") seems to be the mantra. While Content Management problems are the same all over the world, with I18N and RTL as a bonus.

So it is good to see that GroenLinks is choosing for a global answer for addressing a local problem, Drupal as the CMS of choice!

And from what I see in the market, this is only the start. A lot more Dutch sites need to be upgraded, exciting times ahead and an ideal place for the next DrupalCon?

Congratulations to OneShoe btw!

Aart wordt as donderdag twee. Echt een mooie kereltje, en gek op strijken

Brecht besluit in al haar wijsheid enkel aan te kruisen wat ze niet wil van Sinterklaas in alle speelgoedfolders.