Willy Dobbe - Yet Another Drupal Site

Drupal, a top 10 "cool Open Source product of 2009"

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:28:07 +0000

A someone who has been "active" in the Drupal community for over 8 years, it is shocking to see that only in the last 3 years Drupal was really picked up by the mainstream press. This is not due to the quality of the code of Drupal of the community, as much as it has to do with building momentum and a shake out in the CMS landscape. So this story about Drupal being in the "Top 10 coolest Open Source products" (yes, it is that time of the year again) comes as no surprise to anyone how knows the code or the community.

The real power of Drupal however is that 5 (!) other Open Source projectsof the top 10 products use Drupal as a platform to deliver their tools, empower their community. That is the real power of Drupal. 6 (including Drupal self) of the top 10 Open Source tools according to CRN.com use Drupal:

Ledger SMB (a fork of SQL ledger)
DoJo (they hacked Drupal core to get the DoJo in and JQuery out :-) )
Ubuntu (Linux for humans, with their famous bug 1)
Firefox, the best browser chrome :-) )
OO.org, word!

Drupal power. "We, the Drupal community" are proud :-)

Community website of Dutch union of journalists / NVJ using Drupal

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:14:44 +0000

A couple of weeks ago the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ (125 years old) launched a "community" portal based on Drupal. While it was a soft launch, already 999 users have signed up, showing that the need for a place in this niche.

Registered users can blog, ask questions and provide answers, microblog / twitter messages in the site, be active in forums, create and read wikipages, build a portfolio, be-friend people to network, start or join (organic) groups and search for jobs. Employers can post job openings as well.

Lots of content types / functionality usually leading to bad user experience; where do I do what? However, the site is rather popular and gets lots of hits and people do find what they are looking for in the site.

It was build by my employer DOP.nu using core Drupal, many contrib modules as well as half a dozen own modules. The Crowds did the concept and Xlab the design and User Interface.

It is my opinion that sites like these show Drupal at it's best, a community site where people help each other.

Marketplace Eclipse using Drupal

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:05:15 +0000

I still find it shocking to see that there are many many "developers" (especially in the proprietary cms landscape) that use notepad as a IDE and backup tapes as version control. While there are so many tools you /need/ available for free under an open source license. I dont think I ever came accross a question in an RFP about this, but if you ever outtask/source a project, one of your first questions should be what procedures and tooling developers use for doing their job. If the answer is notepad++ you should stay away from that company, no matter how cool the flash design looks.

One of the tools developers need, can be Eclipse, an open source IDE. And now, Eclipse launched a new marketplace site, marketplace.eclipse.org. And yes, it runs Drupal!

From h-online.com

While some of the features of the Marketplace are familiar from its predecessor, there are also many new aspects. For instance, users can now compile custom lists of favourites to keep informed about their chosen plug-ins. Furthermore, lists containing users' most popular plug-ins can now be shared. The search feature, which is now based on Apache Solr, has also been given a major overhaul.

A cool thing is that you can log in with your bugzilla account. Please provide feedback on Ian's blog.

Whitehouse.gov turning blue

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:59:07 +0000

(source)

"Chocolate City"
Uh, what's happening CC?
They still call it the White House
But that's a temporary condition, too.
Can you dig it, CC?

(Chocolate City lyrics by Parliament, 1975 -pfunk at its best).

It turns out that CC became brown then blue. whitehouse.gov switched to Drupal. Anyone up for a photoshopped-mashup between Drulicon and the whitehouse? :-)

For the real deal, checkout Dries' site, that I found via

HP Linux portal on Drupal

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:48:44 +0000

Not a great design (to put it mildly), but a great new name, HP Linux Community Portal on Drupal.

Via h-online.com

Man Bijt Hond using Drupal

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:55:07 +0000

Last week my emloyer Dutch Open Projects launched a new site for the Dutch broadcaster NCRV, manbijthond.nl. Trying to explain the Public Broadcasting system in the Netherlands is impossible but lets just say that from the dozens of channels we have in the Netherlands, three are from 20+ the Public Broadcasters that share these channels with each other. And one of these broadcasters, the NCRV, standardises all marketing and program sites on Drupal.

Man Bijt Hond (Man Bites Dog, an old journalist joke about the definition of news) is a program format that started in Belgium, just like Drupal. The TV program attracts a broad audience and is on early prime time watched by more then half a million people every day. It features sketches but mostly odd news from all over the Netherlands. So the site reflect this, it is a mash-up of elements of the TV program of the last 10 years on a (google) map. Using Drupal for all the views, content types and videos meant we did not have to code lots of complex modules although there is always some custom code to be written. The design is not groundbreaking but clean an mimics the TV program.

The fact that (nearly) all sites of the NCRV (and more Dutch broadcasters will join :-) ) standardises on Drupal might not be big news compared to Sony using Drupal but in the Low Countries it helps to 'sell' Drupal to a broader audience. Go NCRV!

AHOLD using Drupal

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:28:23 +0000

AHOLD is the holding of Albert Heijn (wiki), a major Dutch based retailer with lots and lots of oversees activities. With more the 100.000 employees worldwide and 28 Billion Euros profit in 2007 with an operating income of 1.134 billion Euros (1.5 billion U.S. dollars) really what one would call "an enterprise". And yes, partly due to analyst reports Ahold.com is now... a Drupal site!

The slogan of Albert Heijn in the Netherlands is "AH blijft op de kleintjes letten" ("Albert Heijn keeps looking out for the low prices"). Yes, they can. Low prices, high value: Drupal!

More Drupal at MIT

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:12:21 +0000

Drupal is not rocketsience, but it is nice to see that one of the best universities in the world is using one of the best CMS-es in the world at http://www.csail.mit.edu/. See also the pressrelease and a MIT (WP!) weblog.

DrupalCon DC, one of the best CSS sites of 2008

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:51:32 +0000

Over at webdesignerwall you can find the best CSS sites for 2008. And sure enough, the incredible retro pixel art DC 2009 site is listed there amongst some other great sites. Well deserved, one of the best designed Drupal sites out there and for sure the best DrupalCon site for the next year. Kudos developmentseed!

The Netherlands LOVES Drupal

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:09:31 +0000

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!

Dutch political party Groenlinks on Drupal

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:19:54 +0000

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!

Has been...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:21:55 +0000

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 21:17:11 +0000

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 19:10:42 +0000

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 17:11:30 +0000

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?