Willy Dobbe - CMS

Google's Birthday and Drupal

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:14:44 +0200

It seems that Google is -more or less- 10 years old. To celebrate this, they have a timeline (more on that later ) and a project to do good; 10^100. Drupal.org was just around the corner, I registerd it in later 2001 it seems:
krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ whois drupal.org | grep -i created Created On:26-Apr-2001 11:42:11 UTC

But the real drupal site was drop.org (after "dorp" -village in Dutch- as the myth goes) and it 2001 it looked like this. Yes we needed a redesign back then as well

Google also has the Search 2001 site up, where you can -ego- surf and find results from 2001. Try drupal, the results are from January 2001. The first hit is an article on the PHPNuke site. Yek... I actually used that before switching to Drupal in those days. 5 pages of Drupal hits, 5! And most of them porn. Now you will find a lot more and more relevant hits (Results 1 - 10 of about 22,100,000 for drupal).

Looking back is fun. Some things you can laugh at retrospective, some things you can learn from. For example, the mission statement at that time was:
To develop a leading edge open-source content management system that implements the latest thinking in community publishing, knowledge management, and software design. We value flexibility, simplicity, and utility in our product; teamwork, innovation, and openness in our community; and modularity, extensibility and maintainability in our code.

Long as it might be, it was exact to the point and right, better then our mission. And I hereby plea to let it be our mission again!

Sign up for the Symfony Camp at DOP

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:03:19 +0200

If you are in to Symfony (think Ruby on Rails in PHP if you like that kind of lingo ) be sure to register for the Symfonecamp.com . A lot of good speakers, and excellent location and lots of fun. See sympfony camp snaps on Flickr. . And be sure to bring 42 towels since the pool is open!

Mail this to a friend, stupid functionality!

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:32:38 +0200

Every now and then, I get customers for my employer Dutch Open Projects that have the weirdest functional requirements. Do not get me wrong, the customer is always right but it helps some time if we can discuss and ask why they want certain functionality.

Take for example the "mail this to a friend" function that is still popular in many designs. First of all, it is stupid functionality. If I want to notify a friend about a page, I bookmark it to delicious. If I really want to make sure (s)he sees it, I use instant messaging and as a last resort, mail.

But I'll never use the mailservice of the website, I have to give my and his email address and I do not think that giving aways another persons email address is a good thing to do, and will never give away my address if there is no need to. Then there is spam.

All User Generated Content suffers from:

IP right problems
Trolls
and spam

Anything that can be used by spammers, WILL be used by spammers, including the "mail this to a friend" functionality.

To proof my point, see this mail I got. There is room for some remarks hence that is were the spam goes. And now, the "good" name of GE is associated with the spam and they did in fact send it to me. Stupid functionality (no-one uses it), stupid functionality (everyone can abuse it).

Mail-this-to-a-friend must die!

When webpages become webapplications... the influence on statistics.

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:07:46 +0200

When web pages become web applications. Then page reloads are history and you interact with your webapplicationin your browser in the page and with AJAX/AHAH you will get the data in and out of the page. Nothing new, that is what the marketeers label web 2.0.

But when users interact with pages without having to reload ... when pages become application .. this also means that traditional ways of measuring user activity that are hosted and used as a service, such as Google Analytics, will not be able to tell you what a user has done on a ~~page~~application.

There used to be a time when the success of a website was measured in "hits", way back in the nineties. Then -due to the fact webpages consisted of many HTML elements like Cascading Style Sheets- the success was measured in pageviews. For the last couple of years, the success is measured in unique visitors since advertisers are not that interested in serving the same ad for the 10th times to the same person. And now, due to AJAX, we have to find a new way of measuring the success of webapplication.

Yahoo! understands this and has been offering Yahoo! User Interface services for some time now for free that can be used by a webmaster to give a more rich feeling towards the user. This way, Yahoo still gets to see who is doing what on a website and can offer this as a Analytics competitor as well as use the data for having a better advertising offering with behavioral targeting. The downside is however that to make your pages application, you do more then some icing on the cake; User Interface gadgets are nice. But the real deal is in enriching your data for webapplication use, not just your user interface.

AJAX-As-A-Service (as a new way of Server Based Computing) suffers the same problems as the old way of doing Server based Computing like Citrix has; looking to the world through a straw. Local data and terminal screens from remote do not mix well; a document that is saved on a local harddisk and accessed via a terminal service application still need lots of bandwidth and leads to high latency. The same kind of poblems you encounter when you use hosted AJAX service that are not integrated with your site; the (meta)data of the user is on the webserver and the AJAX application is served from another webserver not able to access all rich metadata.

Therefor only websites that are based on a Content Management Systems that is old will use these kind of services, modern CMS-es like Drupal ship with their own plug-able extend-able AJAX library. And if that CMS enables you to turn a web-page into a webapplication, you have two options to have the right statistics based on the right data; logging from the CMS or raw logging from your website. Drupal never has been good in providing logging analyses; it is good for technical webmasters but the analyses is not usefull at all for marketeers and managers. Analysing raw logging yourself is IMHO still the best way; you also get to see those firefox users that block urchin or have the best firefox plugin aivalble installed. However, it takes time and most of the reporting is by far not as fancy as Google Analytics.

So we will see how AJAX will influence web-analytics, maybe CMS-es will provide better statistics?

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.

Do not ask someone what CMS they are running

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:06:08 +0200

Do not ask someone what CMS they running. If they are using Drupal they will tell you, if not why insult them?

— bert boerland

OpenSource and clouds

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:47:26 +0200

There are two big trends in ICT; Service a a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). And I do think those two go hand in hand and are reflecting changes that are coming towards the ICT landscape. When I say "hand in hand", I do mean that they are complementary (like people are in a relationship) but also that the are in contrast of each other (like in many relationships). It is my opinion that you either outsource
(parts of your) IT activities, or build the solution yourself. You will either use a cloud to deliver your needs, or make your own cloud. It will either be service from the Microsoft's or you will have to build and manage the solution by yourself. You either well use a cheap commodity service with limited customisation to have the complete freedom to fit the software to your business objectives. Let me try to make clear why this is my opinion and how this influences your role as a user or provider of ICT services.

Recent trends have shown that release cycles of software have become shorter and shorter; to keep ahead of our competitors you have to be able to release early and often.

Release early and release often as a way to be able to quickly add new features for the future, fix problems for the current software and to prevent that software becomes obsolete ("end of life"). The perpetual beta as the new adagium. Where flickr was able to deploy during it's booming period a new codebase every 15 minutes, Microsoft was able to make a new operating 7 years. One is using the "service" (cloud) way of offering it's software, the other is using the "fat client" approach. So on one hand proprietary fat client software s facing competition from cloud based services. Sure Google Docs is not as feature rich or reliable as the Office suite of Microsoft but most agree that this is just a question of time and network reliability; in due time Google Apps will be good enough for the masses. Mind you, most if not all cloud services are proprietary and are doing well; salesforce as the most prominent example.

On the other hand, proprietary software faces problems from the Open Source alternatives. OpenOffice.org is a real competitor for MS-Office, the Ubuntu distribution beats Microsoft in many areas and MySQL is giving the absurd licence fees of Oracle a hard time. If proprietary closed source software wants to stay in business, they have to move. Not to a "long tail" niche but in the other direction, to the left side of the tail where you can offer a highly standardised yet customisable version of their product. That way they are able to release early and often and go for a low margin per product sold but sell a lot. So I do think that closed source software has to move towards a service model, away from the client into the data centre.

This means that the other trend (Open Source Software) -that has written "release early and often" written all over it- will dominate the Do It Yourself area. OSS will be used by people and companies that have time and resources to fulfill their needs via highly customisable software. You will see this first with applications that are by nature webbased; the can move to the cloud with less legacy baggage. Software with much interaction with local legacy products will follow later, much later in some case So Office Automation for existing companies will take some serious time to migrate to the cloud since hybrid solutions (some data local, some in the cloud) will be rather expensive and complex to many from security, identity and manageability point of view.

One of the webbased applications that will dominte the "DIY" will be Drupal. It i already the best Content Mangement System ("looking outside") on the market and it is moving more in the direction of the core of business processes ("looking inside"). Drupal will more and more be used as both a frontend system and a backend system; a system where you can aggregate and enrich data for internal use that can be pushed towards for example an external Drupal site.

If you follow this logic (proprietary moving towards commodity cloud service, Open Source solutions towards customisable client service) you might conclude with me that Open Surce CMS-es have nothing to fear from closed source CMS-es like sharepoint. Sharepoint will be the shell around your office data if you want to use that from a cloud perspective, Drupal will be used by enthusiast and enterprises that need more power and have more resources to kickstart and operate that power.

So some people will use an iPhone and the cloud service "Mobile me", others will build Android. Some will use digital TV solutons from their cable providers, others will build MythTV. Some will run an OpenID service themselves, others will use it from a Google/Yahoo! And some will use voicemail (the most used cloud service in the world) and others prefer a local answering machine. I, I use all kind of differtent services, cloud and local, like most people will do.

PS: This posting as very late for last years' Drupal prediction posting or very early for next year, whatever makes more sense to you

PPS: Sure, you can have Open Source "SaaS" solutions as well, for example hosted and managed Drupal instalations but it will be a niche crossover, if that makes sense to you. Also, when I say "build", it can also mean "let other build", aka buy.

PPPS: I do think that SaaS is a complete wrong term; it is a technological acronym. First, people do not want "Software" as a service, but they want a service (as a service). As long as the ICT things about acronyms like SaaS, true adoption of using a "Service as A Service" will only stall. It is time to stop the technology lingo where it should stop; at the door of the customer and think of services instead of software. Second, Software as a Service is a very limited view on what truly can be accomplished with services; it might be disk capacity from the cloud (like S3, Storage as a Service), it might be CPU capacity (like EC2, CPU as a Service), it might be housing (Rackspace as a Service), hosting (Linux box as a Service) or to give an everyday example we are used to, voicemail (Answeringmachines as a Service). Therefor I plea to stop using the term SaaS and use XaaS ("Anything as a Service") or use SaaS for the acronym "Service as a Service", whatever makes more sense to you.

Forrester brings Drupal in the boardroom

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:27:23 +0200

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

Dutch Joomladagen / days

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:57:20 +0200

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.

Vote for Drupal!

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:37:45 +0100

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!

Drupal, when a village becomes a city

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:41:28 +0100

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.

Drupal and Joomla! against the RotW; the idea

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:10:48 +0100

(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

Ulitzer.com in Drupal (in 2008)

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:52:06 +0100

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.

Is drupal.org/planet too crowded?

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:35:35 +0100

DIY Digg clone with Drupal

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:54:32 +0100

When Digg.com started there were some rumors that Digg was build upon Drupal. While these rumors were quickly demystified, the point was that in Drupal it would not be too hard to build something like digg, as the search on google shows

Now over at Wired (I used to read the dead tree edition back in the 90-ies) it says:
Build a DIY Digg Clone with Drupal

Drupal developer Tony Mobily has built a new module for Drupal which enables anyone to start up their own Digg clone. You can grab the code and contribute to the project at drigg-code.org, or you can see it in action at drigg.org.

I am sure that some old mainstream media who are eager to get on the 2.oooh boat (or will drown!) are willing to use something like this. I am not the type that says "there is a module that will do exactly what your business problem is" as some do. Yes, more then 2k modules but most sites need drupal core, views, cck, workflow and a handful of custom modules. But having a Digg-clone.module around sure is easy for those that see "digg-clone" as their business objective.

The funny thing is, back in 2000 / 2001 there was no Drupal. We had drop.org in those days. Drop.org was running Drupal and in fact it was like a Digg without the fancy AJAX (and the overhyped budget.. and the big audience... and...)