Willy Dobbe - Yet Another Drupal Site

Has been...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:21:55 +0200

You know you are a has been if you launch a new site using a kick ass CMS and the projectlead of the CMS is not even blogging it.

Sleep tight Metallica.

NY SUN on Drupal

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:17:11 +0200

The (dead tree) newspaper sector is not particularly known for being innovative or getting up to speed. In fact, it seems that they only look at each other; what system is newspaper Y using, we have to get that as well! As if online the newspapers are competing with each other. They are, but more important, they are competing against every single website in the world. People only have x hours per day to get the latest news or backgrounds per day, and every minute spend on a blog or on a wiki, cant be spend on the Great news paper website.

It seems that the newspaper sector is waiting for the result of The Record Industry versus The Internet and will decide after that has been settled (in a year or 5 ) what they will do online. In the mean time, there is -or so I have been told- something going on on the Internet that is called UGC. Based upon the old credo If You Don't Like the News...Go Out and Make Some of Your Own, these blogs, wikis and other 2.0media are far cheaper to produce and have more knowledge on the subject; hard to believe for Mr. Journalist but true.

But the newspaper industry is still looking at their own navel. At my former employer, I had nearly all Dutch newspapers as a customer and I also visited some "independent" newspapers from the UK and "world" newspapers from Germany. And while all these newspapers where experimenting with new technologies and ways to generated income and bind readers (and let them become writers) at the lower levels in the business units, at the corporate level, the CTO's and CIO's were still full of the proprietary nonsense CMS-es. And they had to be, since they were taking on boat trips with lots of beer and "no cameras" by the proprietary CMS vendors. I once saw a very ugly site that was rather expensive; around 500K euros (800k dollars) that could have been made in Drupal for less then 1/10 and more then that, be a lot better, faster and hipper.

Recently however, I see lots of old media switch towards Drupal. And not just as a CMS or even CMFramework, but as an Enterprise Service Bus. A central hub were all data is aggregated, enriched and send towards another medium.

If you read the news, three things striked me:

NEW YORK The New York Sun has begun using WoodWing's Smart Connection Enterprise editorial solution from WoodWing, headquartered in Zaandam, the Netherlands, with U.S. offices in Detroit.
The paper's WoodWing editorial content-management system has been used in conjunction with Drupal, an open-source Web application framework, as the publishing platform.
Launched in 2002 as New York City's first new general-interest newspaper in two generations, and with a Web site designed by Danilo Black, the Sun now claims an online and print readership of more than one million.

And the three things were:

The NYSun is indeed running an old version of Drupal. Good for them! (well, good for them running Drupal, they might want to upgrade)
There is a Dutch company Woodwing (running Drupal) that is rather big in the media and has 4 offices worldwide
They actually have a rather good slution for the media.

Although their 3 tier graph on this page is a lot of BS!

It is not that the NYSun is a very big site but the cracks in the proprietary CMS world are getting bigger by the day and every newspaper switching towards Drupal, is a good thing. Because in 3 years time, there will be a lot of action, jobs and money to be made in the combination of Drupal and old skool newspapers.

Jumbo.nl on Drupal

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:10:42 +0100

Via a direct message on twitter, I got the news that jumbo.nl switched to a new site today using ... Drupal. Jumbo might not be a world famous brand, but it is a very old (board) game manufacturer, founded in 1853 in the Netherlands. It is a nice looking site, colorful, a bit 2.0-ish but with a stylefull more timeless look. It is not finished content wise yet I think, there are some missing pages. And while using heavily the i18n possibilities of Drupal, it is still based on D5, not on D6, see their changelog. I fully understand the D5 choice, I think that it will take more then 1/2 a year before corporate sites will be build on D6.

Since this year I make money selling and building Drupal sites and the good news is that Drupal is gaining ground very very fast in the Netherlands. And a site like jumbo.nl really helps to sell it to other corporate prospects.

AOL corp on Drupal!

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:11:30 +0100

Via Steven Peck, via 21764, the corporate site of AOL is using... Drupal! Note that their developer site has been using Drupal since nearly a year.

I think it is great to see that the big corporations use Drupal, the showcases make it easier to sell Drupal to other corporations, there is more critical mass, more good things will come to and get out of "the community".

Note that there is (or might be) also a dark side. I will blog about the downside soon, but what do you think -apart from the brand AOL- is the downside of corps like AOL using Drupal?

Adobe's Flex site using Drupal

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:49:25 +0200

Today at the second day of the DrupalCon Adobe launched a new site as a showcase for their Flex technology. They use their own technology for the frontend (flash, flex etc) but the backend is powered by... Drupal! See for yourself, at the showcase site of Flex.

YADS, studyinmontreal.info and the use of tagging "drupalsite" on delicious.

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 14:09:41 +0200

Via marketwire.com I found a new Drupal; www.studyinmontreal.info

"A site like the Study in Montreal portal containing literally thousands of hyperlinks cried out for a tool enabling a small team of users to manage it efficiently," declared Joseph Blauer, Vice-President of Technology at TP1. Drupal, the chosen tool, is an open source web content management system published under the GNU Public License. Its content management capability along with its modular architecture, place Drupal among the most multi-faceted and flexible web content management systems currently available. For Study in Montreal, it clearly demonstrated its superiority for the creation of one of a new generation of collaborative websites.

Nice design (to my likeling at least) and indeed a clear Drupal site, Search for Smurf.

As more people do, I tagged it "drupalsite" at del.icio.us as I -and several others- have been doing for some time. So if you found a Drupal site and do have a delicous account, be sure to tage it "drupalsite".

Remove quotes around phrases to match each word individually: "blue smurf" will match less than blue smurf.

Drupal Sucks... (or in Soviet Russia Content Manages You)

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:23:58 +0200

I like TWIT and follow lots of their podcasts. Amongst others, I follow MacBreakWeakly. They are known to start making ratholes. In their latest podcats 55, they end up on a debate about if Open Source projects are innovative. It is an old discussion and both side (yes, no) have their points. If you look at it from the lower OSI levels and the commodity stuff, they might be right in a way. Linux for example is invisible for users, GNU/Linux might be visible for sysadmins and KDE for users. But Linux is invisible. Innovations in the kernel are regarded by most people as efficiency, not as innovation. A new cool filesystem? Means nothing for the average user. Faster? Smaller? Cleaner? Efficiency, not innovation…

And if you look at OpenOffice.org –no matter how great the product is- it is lagging behind their mean competitor; the Microsoft Office suite. Sure, it is better at I18N and obtaining standards and good enough for most people. But it isn’t regarded as innovative by most people. So there is a case for people saying that Open Source software is not innovative. Note, these people are not debating that open source licenses are innovative, or that the open source way of running projects are innovative. "Just" that the software –the product- is not innovative.

On the other end of the spectrum are people saying that true innovation can only be reached by openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally; Wikinomics or the “open source way” of project management. These people look at Mozilla (Firefox) and how Microsoft is struggling to follow up and is playing that game rather bad. Or they look at KDE and Gnome that are way better UI’s then Vista and for sure then XP.

My stand? Open Source Software is software. Some software is highly visible – a browser, a GUI- some software is only enabling other software, a kernel, memory allocation or a filesystem. Innovations are everywhere; some are visible for the enduser, some for the programmer, some not at all. If you only label “innovation” that what you can see, then you innovation is as big as you … well have vision. And most people have a very limited sight; they might look at the eycandy stuff (yes, that would include me) or at the API’s but seldom see the complete 360.

Now how is this relevant to Drupal? Well, Drupal is both a Content management System that users can work with and it highly visible for them as it is a Content Management “Framework”, only visible for programmers. So innovation that we – the Drupal Community- make will be regarded by some as visible and by some as invisible. Views for examples is way ahead of its time, SQL statements via an easy GUI. If you are a programmer of a website builder, you will love this kind of innovation. Now if you are a webmaster or use rof that same site, you will not see this and hence not label it as innovation. Point is: Drupal is for the user and for the programmer. Innovations in Drupal are for everybody, it is just that not that many people will see it and hence label it as innovation

No back to Mac Break Weakly. In the podcast 55 around 30 minutes after the start, Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Andy Ihnatko start a rant about innovation and Open Source. For Apple lovers a normal discussion. Mac OSX is based upon a BSD kernel ("not innovative") and has a proprietary good GUI. The basics is on Open Sourced, the value is brought by proprietary software. Or so the arguments starts.

Then the move to Drupal. Here is a transcript of the rant (snipped some stuff):

Andy: ”The last thing I want is that any software or technology is under control of the Open Source Software community…
Leo: ”What?!”
Andy: ..”because they are really really bad creating end user applications.
Merlin: … that was a lot more true 5 years ago. Are you actually using recently stuff? Cause lots of stuff has come a really long way.
Andy: I got the latest Ubuntu… I got the latest Open Office. And I still don’t have a working Wifi on that notebook. And I still think Open Office is where Mickrosoft Office was 4 years ago. All the really cool stuff. All the really innovative stuff, is created by companies like Apple. Open Source is great at standard building and it is great for creating alternatives for people. [...OpenMoko vs iPhone rant…] I don’t think that Open Source developers understand the need of end users who just want a solution.
Merlin: … that can be very true. It can be hard to use. And right now, I am doing a lot of work with Drupal… this is an Open Source application
Andy: Don’t talk about Drupal, IT SUCKS!
Leo: Laughs very loud.

Then it goes on and one. Now before you bash Andy, listen to him and think about his points from his point of view. I think Drupal –the community, the project and the product- is one of the most innovative software projects. But a user is always right. Always. And if a potential user thinks the product sucks, we need to make it better. Not change his mind, change the product and let him change his mind.

Twit.tv by the itself is a Drupal site build by our friends over at lullabot.

Wordsy, they love books and Drupal

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:18:04 +0200

Wordsy | We love books. We love words. We are wordsy. A nice site in English about well... books and words. A brown design, about books and made with the Drupal CMS. And Dutch based as well.

Another brown site, in The Netherlands, about writers, made with Drupal is schrijf.trouw.nl, although that site is written in Dutch.

After a long long time, it is good to see that in the Netherlands the use of Drupal is increasing.

MediaMe using Drupal

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 20:28:29 +0200

Over at AMinfo.com the legandary quote:

Developed on a Drupal open source platform, mediaME is 'Web 2.0 ready', enabling users to upload 'rich' information, share and interact.

And indeed MediaMe.com uses Drupal. Despite the TwoDotOoooh mentioning, good to see that Drupal is used more and more in the tail outside the standard places (OSS projects, newspapers and big corporations). "MediaMe is a community for media, advertising and marketing professionals in the Middle East region."

Google Pack in adsense

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:44:08 +0100

As a content provider (e.g. blogger with Google Adsense :-) ) you can now run "Google Pack Referral" ads. I once installed Google Pack, a combination of Firefox (google branded), Goole Earth (cool), Picasa (an excellent photo organizer), a screensaver (bloat I think), Google toolbar for IE (like you need IE :-) ) and Google desktop. Some additional features, free Norton Anti Virus (running windows, you *need* this), Ad-aware (antispyware, you need something like this as well) and Adobe reader (useful). Most of these programs you can download for free as well. So there is no need to dowload the pack, but for first time users, it might be handy. Be aware, I liked the Google Desktop but de-installed it. I like Google, I trust to some account Google. But knowing everything about me/my computer, combined with knowing everything from my online habits, is just too much. There is a trade off between privacy and usability. You are free to try it out, if your trade off parameters are different, you might like the tools. I cant life without some of them, not just all.

Note: if you download them via the ad in this posting, I get some kickback from Google. If you dont like me, or this site, just go Google pack and download from there.

The feed of this website in a timeline

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 12:02:15 +0100

Based on the work of MIT's timeline, grabbed from Timeline.to. A Drupal module is available as well to combine views, nodes and time.

YADS Fundraising Wikimedia

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:04:52 +0100

Yet Another Drupal Site, the fundrasing site of Wikimedia.

YADS teachingexpertise.com

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:32:43 +0100

teachingexpertise.com, a new drupalsite.

The design is a bit too "two dot oooissh" for me but it i consistent and clean.Though the favicon is unlike the rest of the site, small detail though.

All in all good clean nice site, good work ~~Nicholas~~ Janak!

A Microsoft site running Drupal?

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 05:51:59 +0100

Very odd, a Microsoft site (not just content, it is a MSN affiliate site!) APC Magazine that is running OpenSource software:
[root@tug ~]# telnet www.apcmag.com 80 Trying 203.122.238.138... Connected to www.apcmag.com (203.122.238.138). Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2006 18:47:28 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.4 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=rmurbvket2m7af03fmf001n8o5; expires=Sun, 26 Nov 2006 22:20:49 GMT; path=/ Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

And more then just using a LAMP platform, it is using... Drupal.

Drupal Flash

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 03:35:37 +0200

I think I have been blogging about this site before, but all things flash and Drupal in Dutch can be found at this nederflash Drupal site.