Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.

In 2006 Drupal was the runner up for the precious Webware CMS Award. And last year our beloved CMS even was the overall winner. By winning the competition, the Drupal Association got 5000 Dollars that was used for amongst others funding Drupal Conferences and to buy hardware for hosting the Drupal infrastructure. But even better then the money, Drupal got more airtime and more and more people recognized the power of Drupal.

This year, Drupal was once again nominated in the category "Publishing" and you are encouraged to vote on Drupal to make sure we win again this year. Please help by spreading the word and vote, you deserve it!

When I was young, I grew up in a small village. In this village I knew everybody, everybody knew me, people knew what other people did and people kept an eye out for eachother. Small talk about a small Bert growing up in a small village.

When I studied I moved to a small town, when I started working I moved to another small town. And while there is more bohemian clture in bigger places, the disadvantage is that you don't know the name of your neighbour. Small talk about big city problems.

The point is that people like communities. People like peers that are the same but different. People like people that they can related to, cultural wise, religion wise, interest wise.

Drupal, an Open Source CMS that I like, grew. It grew a lot. It was a small village ("dorp") when it started and when I started to life there. People knew each other, looked out for eachother, cared for each other. Now Drupal is a town. A big town. People don't know each other any more and might get lost in the town. Is that bad?

Now, in the bigger city of Drupal, people start building smaller communities with people with the same interest. For example at groups.drupal.org, in local user groups and other interest groups. This is how people can still be able to know the name of their neighbour and yet be part of The Bigger Municipality of Drupal.

You can see the grow in many ways. For example the key players grew in how they cant in their Belbin roles and the Association is a sign and a reaction of the growth. Right now there are 800 people in the Boston DrupalConference. Only 3 years ago, there were 80 in Amsterdam. Another good example is that there is more differentiation in Drupalshops, some go regional (if you could call China a region) or local (DOP.nu), others go for long-tail niches. The fact that there is now a commercial data migration shop is a good sign and I hope there will be more niche Drupalshops; for updates, for themers, for designers, for specific languages translations, for testing, for making a good devel > test > staging > production environment and for numerous other things that you could do in the Drupal city.

Yes we are growing up, past adolescence I think and have grown to a nice community where there is a place for everyone. And I like my small neighbourhood in the bigger Drupal city.

(Panorama view in full)
Since this month I am working over at Dutch Open Projects, an Open Source implementer in the Netherlands that specialises in PHP; zend, symfony, SugarCRM, Joomla and Drupal. Doing both Drupal and Joomla is fine with me, both have a place in the CMS landscape. And the goals of DOP is to offer the right Open Source solution for the customers needs, not to start a holly war of one Open Source tool against another.

Since the headquarter of DOP is located at a very nice place, we often hold x-camps at our place. Dont be surprised that a deer wonders by the swimmingpool out of the forrest behind our villa! Some time ago we had the SymfonyCamp over at our place. And we do have enough room for lots of tents and a BBQ.

See the full symfony pool at fickr.

We are planning on organizing a Joomla!/Drupal camp over a next couple of month. And the use the healthy competition between the two projects and to use the power of Open Source, we had the following idea:

From both communities a couple of dozen people can signup and camp at our place for a weekend. During this weekend both have the assignment to make as many migration tools as possible to migrate from the dominant proprietary CMS-es in the Netherlands; GX, Greenvaley, Smartsite and Tridion towards their CMS. The one who does the most or best wins. And since all the migration code has to be GPL, the Open Source community at large wins as well!

Note that this is only the first idea, we have to get "development licenses" for all these CMS-es and provide demo installs of all these as well. So the final assignment might be different from this one if this one is not practical. Our goal is not to make profit of the camp, not by far. So the entrenance fee will be free or very low. Why do we invest in these camps? To align with the communities, to get exposure but most of all to give the proprieatry CMS users a way out towards freedom. And we hope it doesnt hurt for our recruiting proces; we are hiring!

We try to get many high ranking officers from both communities to (re)present their CMS but there will be room as well for "the soldiers". If you are interested, drop a comment; it will be published within 8 hours. Or you can drop me a line; bertATborlanDOTcm. I will post more information about this "J/D vs the RotW" camp when it comes available.

And yes, our halfpipe pool will be cleaned before this event I hope, so be sure to bring your bikini as well

A bit old news but I have some backlog in mail, bookmarks, word, upgrades, visiting friends and even sleep.
Web 2.0 Journal is writing about Ulitzer choosing Drupal as their CMS:

Ulitzer.com, which will be launched in 2008, with 5,500 authors and more than 550,000 original articles, is looking for enterprise software architect(s), programmer(s), and Web app developer(s). The site will offer original content in more than 2,000 topics ranging from AJAX to Zebra.

If ulitzer.com would start in 208 and would use Drupal, I think it will be the largest Drupal ist in number of nodes out there:

Launching with 5,500 Authors & 550,000 Original Articles!

At least, I dont know of any site with half a millions "nodes". Drupal.org is nearly half way there, do you know a site with more nodes? If so, drop a comment (will be moderated and publish within 8 hours).

Who will qualify working for them:

• Are you the person who wrote most of the Facebook or MySpace code?
• Were you the main architect who converted Yahoo! code from a proprietary system to PHP?
• Is your Google badge number smaller than 100?
• Have you delivered a large-scale CMS on Drupal, Django or another popular open source platform?
• Do you agree that CMS would be more appropriately defined as "Community Management System"?

No, I am not Ulitzer material. But at least I have one of the points right:
Old posting on my site:

"My prediction, within 3 years the acronym "CMS" wont mean "Content Management System" anymore but will be redefined to "Community Management System".

I might even be the first.