cmsXperts

After announcing a “feature freeze” for their 5.x and 6.x versions while the team is working on the next major release, Drupal 7.x, several bug fixes have just been released for current versions of the software to address several security issues in the platform.

The new versions, Drupal 5.13 and 6.7, correct cross site forgery and XSS vulnerabilities that could result in database damage or unfiltered content being inadvertently published on the site. For this reason, Drupal users are highly recommended to perform the upgrade.

The platform can be updated in two ways, either by patching the current core files with the updated ones, or — best option — by performing a full upgrade by downloading and installing the new versions on the server.

Either way, webmasters should remember to update.php to refresh the menu cache and other website caches and to make a backup copy of their .htaccess and robot.txt files, since the updates modify both these files.

In a move that has taken many by surprise, Microsoft recently added support for the open source Drupal and WordPress content management systems to its new Web Application Installer, as a further confirmation that such products have now reached a quality at least equal to that of other commercially available products.

As explained in the Web Application Installer homepage, the platform — which was launched on October 15 — is meant to facilitate the process of configuring and running some of the best-known and most reliable Web applications, providing support for both PHP and ASP.net:

“With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items and then install them on your computer.”

The executable is free to download and only 650 KB in size and, although just in its beta stage, support is already available through the user forums, which are just starting to become populated with messages. Software requisites include Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 as the operating system and the .NET 2.0 Framework. In addition, only x86 and 64-bit architectures are currently supported by the program.

Apart from WordPress and Drupal, the software also enables easy installation of DotNetNuke, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce and the popular open source phpBB bulletin board frontend. In other words, Microsoft would seem to have made a meaningful step in the world of open source applications with its latest creation.

This somewhat surprising move from the company becomes a reason of surprise for many market analysts, particularly after Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, took a clear position against the open source movement in general, even coming to the point of calling the Linux operating system “a cancer” a few years back, as reported by The Register at the time.

Since that controversial declaration, it would seem that the company has been gradually changed its perspective towards the entire free software movement, providing indirect support when needed instead of taking a close-minded position like before. This has been the case, for instance, with both Apache and JQuery library, sponsoring the former and adopting the latter in an effort to develop increasingly efficient Web applications.

In a recent article appeared on CNET it is reported that Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s top intellectual property lawyer, stated that the differences between closed and open source code are going to be fading in the near future to create a “mixed source” model in which the two can coexist:

“I actually think the war between proprietary and open source is a thing of the past [...] [But] if every effort to license proves not to be fruitful, ultimately we have a responsibility to customers that have licenses and to our shareholders to ensure our intellectual property is respected.”

In fact, Microsoft has asserted on many occasions that GNU/Linux violates a number of its patents and intellectual properties, although allegations have never been too specific and no legal action has been taken so far by the company, which has instead signed several agreements with Linux distributions such as Red Hat.

The reaction in the open source world has been overall positive, although inevitably skeptic. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert reports the news with excitement on his own blog, speculating that it could end up introducing the platform to — potentially — millions of users, even though the software is just in its beta stage at the moment.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, also reports the news, withouth hiding a good dose of surprise. Hopefully, this is just the continuation of a very slow process of acceptance by Microsoft of the fact that open source projects and initiatives can no more be ignored, particularly when it comes to Web frameworks and applications.

Yet another great tool for the webmaster, Drupal is what is commonly referred to as a “Content Management Framework”, an application programming interface (API) that can in turn be used to build customized content management systems.

Drupal is an extremely flexible cross-platform software that can easily adapt to a number of different applications, offering webmasters solutions that range from blogs to complex e-commerce sites.

The History of Drupal

Unlike countless others open source projects, the history of Drupal is somewhat simple and hasn’t been marked by any major drama such as disputes and legal controversies, although the story is certainly still worth being told.

The software first saw the light in 1998 from the hands of the Belgian programmer Dries Buytaert, and was initially thought as a simple bulletin forum framework which was being used by him and his friends on a local area network to share notes and ideas with his college mates.

The day following his graduation, the group of friends decided to host the site on the Internet to stay in touch. According to Dries, the reason behind the choice of the domain name “drop.org” was a simple typo: the namethat was initially chosen was in fact “dorp”, the Dutch word for “village”, which seemed like a fitting name for their little community of students.

In 2001, after seeing a lot of interest from people suggesting improvements for this tool, Dries decided to release the software with an open source license and decided to name it “Drupal”, after the Dutch word for “drop”.

With time, the framework gradually expanded to progressively add new features in a completely modular way, a philosophy that has been praised by many webmasters and is arguably the very reason for the significant surge in popularity that this tool has encoutered during the last year, with an user base of 350,000+ and consistently growing.

Drupal Features

Drupal sample theme

While this CMS is certainly powerful and feature-rich, the learning curve for the administrative area can be steep, and for this reason this product is certainly not the most user-friendly among content management systems. A full use of the system features takes some getting used to, after which the unique features of this platform really start to emerge.

Because of the great modularity of the platform, the basic features become hard to review, as the “core” version merely consists of a very simple tool to let you edit contents and layouts of your website, even in a somewhat “spartan” way.

Much of the power of this tools comes in fact from its incredibly vast selection of modules and extensions, including themes and layouts to fully customize your website. In a way, one could say that the only feature of the Drupal platform is the possibility to customize it.

Drupal Customization: Themes and Plugins

The “core” version, which is the official release of this software, contains a few default themes from which you can choose to first test and experiment different layouts on your site. However, if you want to stand out from the crowd, choosing a customized theme should be a must for you.

You can find many free themes specifically developed for Drupal on their official site. The first thing that you’ll notice is that, unlike with many other platforms, Drupal themes greatly differ from one another, which is a further testimony to the power and flexibility offered by this tool.

Several thousands modules are also available from the official site and range from tool to aid ad placement and file management to a fully featured e-commerce framework complete with shopping carts and password encryption. These modules are developed by third parts (mostly users), and when using them it is always advisable to keep an eye on security issues that might arise from bugs in their code and make your site more vulnerable to malicious users’ attacks.

In order to help the process of using the right tools for your site, a feature called “Project types” is also available for download. Project types define the type of site you want to install to a higher level, and can therefore guide you in choosing the right themes and plugins that you will most likely be needing.

Finally, official translations in a total of 45 languages are also available and complete the exhaustive set of tool at your disposal to make your site really stand out from the crowd.

Pros and Cons of Drupal

The biggest obstacle to the webmaster is the first approach to this software: in all honesty, when installing a CMS this renowed, one would think that the user interface will be user-friendly and easy to use, but unfortunately that is not always the case. Drupal developers have however acknowledged this and an improved user experiences is said to be the focus of the releases to come.

Atlantis Drupal theme

Once the obstacle has been overcome, the full power of this tool immediately becomes clear and largely compensates for the initial difficulties: with many other CMS, certain aspects in the layout, site structure or internal linking in a website can reveal exactly which tool the webmaster has used: this is certainly not the case with Drupal, in which the very high level of customization makes something like that nearly impossible.

In the latest years, a reported “boom” in the number of Drupal downloads and installations has served as a further testimony of the validity of this tool: downloads alone have reportedly doubled in 2008, and the uptrend certainly looks far from being over.

The developer community is also experiencing an unprecedented growth which is noticeably benefitting users and the quality of the software, and especially security aspects: a great exception in the world of open source CMS, Drupal is in fact considered a tool of particularly high security standards, with issues of this nature that are quickly taken care of by a developing community of about 2,000 and constantly growing.

All in all, while Drupal may not be your first choice if what you’re looking for is mostly an user-friendly admin interface, this tool is certainly worth trying out. Once you’ve successfully moved your first steps there, you’ll quickly learn to appreciate and productively use this tool for your website.

According to a 50-pages comprehensive report compiled by Rich Shreves at WaterAndStone, the three open source content management systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are by far the most used publication-oriented CMS on the Web, having opened up a large gap on the rest of the pack that only seems to be getting wider with time.

In the introduction, Shreves illustrates the aim and importance of the document:

Debating the relative popularity of the many open source content management systems
provides an endless source of fodder for blogs and discussion forums. People want to know
who the market leaders are, not just as an academic exercise but often in an effort to help
make informed decisions about product selection.

A strong market share also means having the possibility to rely on a strong community-based support, ease in finding professional that have experience personalizing themes and plugins specifically for that platform, as well as an indirect confirmation on the stability and general validity of the tool itself.

CMS weekly downloads. Licensed via CC-BY-NC

The report, which concentrates exclusively on publication-oriented open source CMS and leaving aside other important commerce-oriented solutions such as the popular and GPL-licensed osCommerce, tries to assess the popularity of such tools by considering a large number of independent factors such as an estimation on the number of weekly downloads, live installations, third party support, books in print, and the “brand strength” measured in terms of elusive factors such as inbound links, search engine visibility and Google search volume.

The interpretation of the large amount of data gathered is certainly interesting, as it is at times contradictive. For instance, while data shows that WordPress is by far the most downloaded CMS by a factor of 4x on its nearest competitor (Joomla!), the latter is also the one for which you can find the largest number of user guides and the largest number of personalized custom layout development services, and the one with the highest Google search volume.

Of course, what this tells us is that we need to carefully evaluate the specific characteristics of each CMS and interpret the data rather than just say that “the one with the best numbers wins”: it also tells us that it’s incredibly hard to find a single, definite metric to assess once and for all which content management systems feature the best market shares.

All things considered, WordPress seems to be the most widely used content management system. The factors that seem to have influenced its popularity the most are mainly the flexibility given by its plugin architecture and the subsequent trend of webmasters to make of this platform their tool of choice for their fully-featured websites, rather than just their blogs. Not to mention the enviable stability and the very active development team, which keeps rolling out new versions (for new platforms as well) at an impressive pace.

After the news of a GoDaddy user forced to pay the hosting company a $6,759 fine because of a bug in a third-party Drupal backup module that caused bandwidth usage well beyond the account limits, a more relieving news has hit the press in the last hours: Acquia, a company contributing to the Drupal project, just released Acquia Drupal, a much-awaited commercially supported version for this popular content management system.

Acquia Announcement and Features

While Drupal is by no means the first company to feature commercial support for their software (see Mambo), the big difference is in the price tag: Acquia Drupal will in fact be completely free to use for anyone. Dries Buytaert, Drupal co-founder, explains:

[Acquia Drupal] is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on Drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

So, while the product is not being developed from scratch and some users may not see its release as such an outstanding improvement, the good news is that an even greater effort is being put in by the 27 full-time employees and contractors that are developing this platform, bringing the quality of its core software, along with that of its modules, to a much greater stability.

The main downside of this move is thought to be the confusion that could arise for the very similar nomenclature for the two versions of the CMS — the commercially developed and the open source, community-developed one — which will most certainly make it harder for novice users to understand exactly the license terms for their version of choice.

For those who might think this is not that much of a drawback, it is still worth remembering how disputes over unclear license terms have brought to drastic consequences in the past — again, such as in the case of Mambo, whose disputes over its unclear license terms eventually lead to the birth of the popular Joomla! CMS.

In a way, the Drupal business model recalls that of the Red Hat GNU/Linux distribution, with the code being entirely licensed through the GNU GPL, but offering paid support to business customers, which the company hopes to see migrate to Acquia during the next few months.

Along with Acquia, the Drupal community also announced the Acquia Network, which offers subscription-based access to technical support as well as remote network services, with entry level subscriptions to the network free of charge until the end of the year. The subscription will also allow users to access dedicated forums and other resources being tailored to the specific needs of business clients.

Differences Between Acquia and Classic Drupal

The main difference between the two versions at this moment is the inclusion of 20 to 30 stable modules directly into the Acquia platform, which, as Buytaert announced, will be benefit from commercial support as well. A classic Drupal user would have to download and install each individual module instead in order to reach the same setup. Acquia includes extra themes as well.

As already mentioned, Acquia includes commercial support as well. There are five different levels, which makes the entire system quite flexible and encourages webmasters to try out its features without spending a fortune in yearly fees:

• Community: no introductory price, $150 as the starting price (support through forums);
• Standard: introductory price of $500, starting price of $800 (forums and tickets);
• Professional: $1,900/$2,500, support through forum, tickets and email;
• Enterprise: $4,300/$5,000, support through forums, ticket system, email, chat and telephone;
• Elite: negotiable price.