The original motivation for this site came from a request from the salesforce who asked for technical advice for a healthcare professional who wanted a site for a group of medics to communicate and for a community of practice.
The simple comment, ‘we have no money’, focused my thinking on open source systems and quite quickly I started to look at Joomla (nee mambo). Initially this product struck me as great but then, as I explored further, it seemed to ‘fall off a cliff’ when trying to just add another feature. Whilst this may not be the average user experience for me it was annoying and fatal.
There followed a quick tour of many of the open source content management systems. From Typo [just too complex] to PostNuke to the various Wikis. Then onto Drupal.
Immediately I liked Drupal because of the fundamental product architecture based around a taxonomy [eyes glazed over] which linked into the earlier work on Information Architectures and Metadata I had started at Glaxo a decade earlier. The second great thing about Drupal was the extendability of the product.
In November 2005 I initiative a short ‘time boxed’ research project of just 10 days. The immediate targets of ‘Project X’ was to implement a ‘Drupal infrastructure in a Microsoft / Sharepoint shop. In 5 days we had the Drupal environment linked to the existing infrastructure so had time left over and we embarked on 2 developments.
- A who has read this block
- Automatic categorisation of content
Just describing the first application is important. It has struck me since starting in ‘groupware’ that all our systems have a very weak view of users, for example working in the lab and using a journal distribution list you can see who has read it and can use this ‘meta’ information to know who to talk to about the article. Or if you are in a team you might know not to bother reading the material. It echoes Tracy Kidders key paper ‘The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker’. Move to the web and the ‘personal computer’ becomes all too real – we all sit in our virtual cubes oblivious to what our colleagues and co-workers are interested in or reading.
Enter Drupal and the marks on the knowledge worker are revealed with the following code
$pagepath=$_GET[‘q’];
$sql=”SELECT COUNT(a.uid) AS hits, a.uid, u.name FROM {accesslog} a LEFT JOIN {users} u ON a.uid = u.uid WHERE u.name<>” AND a.path='”.$pagepath.”‘ GROUP BY a.uid, u.name order by 1 desc LIMIT 5″;
$users=db_query($sql);
$blockoutput = “Page has been accessed by<BR/>”;
while ($user=db_fetch_object($users)) {
$blockoutput .= l($user->name,”user/$user->uid”).” (“.$user->hits.” times)<BR/>”;
}
return $blockoutput;
It was the quality of the underlying design and the ease with which it could be developed that made me a complete Drupal bigot.
But then ….
But then progress slowed. As I introduced more and more modules I found that I was increasingly spending time de-bugging and ‘futzing’ around. This would suggest to me that Drupal, although good, is like a classic sports car: fantastic performance and capability but only if you know how to drive it, and are prepared to spend your Sunday mornings tinkering rather than driving. I don’t want to sound negative, but developing a complex information environment does have an associated ‘cost of ownership’.
If you want easy then you have to pay for an out of the box product and live with its constraints, if you want sophistication and/or have bright people working with you go for Drupal.
The next revelation was the MTV site and WOS. The former provides an idea of what Drupal capabilities [not a Mickey Mouse product] the latter “Drupal on a USB stick”. That this range of sophistication and power is present in one product is terrific.
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