Selling Drupal. Not a contradiction but not as easy as selling a license of a proprietary CMS. Selling something that is "free" (gratis) seems like an odd idea to many. So how do we get our beloved Drupal CMS spread in a broader range that home blogs, new media sites and the like?

Well, some prospects have functional requirements for their CMS like "It has to start with a D and end with Drupal". Usually there is a passionate user somewhere in the ICT department that convinced some people to go for Drupal. And while this technocratic approach does have its drawbacks, it is a good way to gain more ground and bring Drupal on a higher level.

But most of the time the prospect "just wants a CMS". And since there are zillions of Open Source CMS-es it is hard to choose. Most OSS CMS-es do not have a local "sales" so the company will end up with a proprietary CMS that is years lagging, only have a dozen developers and a couple of hundreds users but with a sales person that is a member of the same club as the CEO.

However, now most bigger companies are moving towards their third CMS implementation, people know what they want from a CMS and people are actually looking for an Open Source CMS and hence an Open Source implementer like my employer is in the Netherlands. And those bigger enterprises all read Gartner, Forrester, MetaGroup and other IT research and advisory companies. I have a very strong opinion about those companies (just echoing yesterdays news for companies that will be in today by tomorrow) but that is a different story. In the boardroom magic quadrants, hype cycles and two by two tables are the goal for any powerpoint wisdom, so if you want to be in the boardroom you have to play chess on the management chessboard; a 2 x 2 matrix.

CNet (writing many rtiles about Drupal in a positive way!) has a piece called Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems. This is really /great/ news, instant boardroom Fähigkeit for Drupal. Forrester says so so we need Drupal!

You can read the excerpt of the report over at Forrester:

This document answers frequently asked questions about the role that open source plays in the WCM market.

You have to pay for the real article but even without reading 20 pages about community, functionality etc, I think it is fine to say that Drupal will be a word you can say in the boardroom from now on. "Could you please fill my cup with some coffee Drupal's" for example.

Thanks to Kieran and others who gave input for the report

Ondanks de mini safari op de iPhone de beste mobile browser is die ik ken -100% bruikbaar op elke non flash site- kan het handig zijn om voor mobile gebruikers (zoals iPhone beztters) andere content en layout aan te bieden.

Zo is ene mobiele gebruiker waarschijnlijk minder in to achtergronden van het nieuws maar wil wel easy digestable (nu.nl alike ) nieuws zien, het weer en de file meldingen. En omdat de 2G(eneratie) iPhone met 3G(generatie) UMTS nog niet in Nederland beschikbaar is, doet een site er goed aan de useragent van een browser op te vragen en andere content in een andere layout aan te bieden. Niet door een "m".example.com te doen maar door de gebruiker contekst aware content en layout te geven; als op een iPhone op lage snelheid dan een kleine eenvoudige pagina, als op een JS enabled browser een rijke AJAX applicatie.

En dat is precies wat RTL nieuws doet, ga op je iPhone naar de site en je krijgt de eenvoudige pagina in vorm en functie. Goed gedaan!

As people know from reading the footer on Drupal.org, Dries is the owner of the trademark "Drupal". Trademarks -and law in general- are complicated; not something every Drupal coder, tester, user might understand or is even interested in.

However, there are always people that are not interested in the community, do not care about the law, but only care for themselves. They want to make money abusing the assets of the Drupal community and not by using it, contributing to it.

One of those kinds of people registered Drupal.nl some time ago, claiming it was an internal name for a service called "Domain name Registration tool Using PHP And Linux... And ran an anti Open Source CMS site on the domain claiming that Open Source solution where thousands of people are working on and millions of people use every day, could never be as good as his own home made CMS.

Dries wrote this man a letter, a letter stating that Dries as the owner of the Drupal trademark would like to get the ownership of the domain. We had an agreement however, the man sold it to another person days before he would transfer the domain to Dries.

This new owner will be named here; Robert de Bock from Me in IT.nl. So we had to start again, contacting him. But Robert was different; he knows about Open Source, cares about Drupal and without any legal pushing transferred the domain free towards Dries! So a big "Hooray" for Robert de Bock, a nice person that bought in good faith the Drupal.NL domain and when Dries contacted him handed al rights of the domain to Dries!

krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ whois drupal.nl
Domain name:
drupal.nl

Status: active

Registrant:
BUY000971-LEASE
D Buytaert
...
Administrative contact:
BUY000943-LEASE
D. Buytaert
...

If you visit Drupal.NL right now, it will be redirected to the Dutch Drupal.BE site. This might or might not change in the future, that is up to Dries. But at least we do not have a Drupal.NL site running on the web claiming that Open Source is bad.

Thank you Robert for contributing the domain to Dries and thereby to the bigger Drupal community!

The first owner? Lets forget about him.
The windmill? It's located in the village I live and just there as a cliché. We do not walk on wooden shoes, we don not life in windmills and we do not smoke weed. But we do care about Drupal and domain names.

Wat doe je als krant als de omzet daalt, de kosten stijgen er de abbonees "ietsje wegholen? Dan gooi je het laatste wapen in de strijd dat je nog hebt.

Kwaliteit? Nee!
Auto's dan? Hmm, goede richting!
Borsten? Sure thing!

Neem nu dit plaatje. Met een beschrijving als:

Een van de tienduiizenden fans...

Als er 10.000 mensen staan, waarom dan deze foto gemaakt die niets met het evenement te maken heeft? Waarom je zelf etaleren op de "voorpagina" als een 80 jarige botox Dolly Parton? Nee, de VK heeft het zwaar en grijpt naar pagina 3 om haar problemen op de voorpagina zichtbaar te maken.

En dit is zeer zeker geen incident. Al een tijdje valt me op dat het blok onderaan de vk.nl pagina dat gaat naar HartenZiel een van de twee keer behoorlijk sexueel geaard is. Alles voor de hits...

En als ik als fijnproever dan nog even mag zeggen: dit is geen F(A) cup maar een magere ge-wonderbra-de C cup. Niets bijzonders...

The Drupal Association has two main goals:

1. To facilitate the Drupal community
2. To protect the Drupal community and her assets

Communication and hence promotion is an important part of making sure we get closure to reaching our goals. And for that, we write press releases for important Drupal (community) events, for example the release of Drupal 6.

I am not a big supporter of the idea that the Association has to do payed press-releases, for example pay a news agency like PRNewswire to spread the word. IMHO we should use the power of the community to spread the word, the quality of the product to speak for itself and use mouth to mouth for getting our product out there. I know that the Association is not a community and in fact more "a corporate" but we (the Association) should align with our biggest asset: the community. Not with some press agency; our proprietary friends can do that better and the commercial Drupal shops will as well. In fact some of them have been making lots of waves with the press releases.

But with press releases like this one from Mediacurrent the Drupal Association has a lot less work to do. I quote:

Drupal's powerful taxonomy system, fine grained security, and distributed architecture made it a natural choice to capture the in-depth functionality Carlos was looking for.

and

...the Drupal CMS will now allow Emory administrators to seamlessly update and edit content within their site.

The release looks more pro Drupal then pro Mediacurrent or the site they made.... hold on... there is not even a link towards the site they have been building? And as a logo, they did not use their client's or their own, but have chosen our Druplicon?

So thank you Mediacurrent for choosing Drupal and promoting it. You might as well join our marketing team. Really

BTW: Did anyone else notice that the Pagerank of Drupal.org went down from 9 to 8? Oooh my, the sky is falling.

BTW2: My official function within the Association is now Rabble Rouser, "see" podcast 58 from Lullabot. Thanks Earl!