News : Drupal and The Future of News

Is Drupal on your IT map yet? Chances are pretty good that either you are shaking your head vigorously in the affirmative, or you have no idea what I’m talking about. Drupal is an open source web content management system … though this is actually a little like saying that a Jaguar is a car; it’s true as far as it goes, but the description doesn’t really do Drupal justice.

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Drupal started out in 2000 as a community project in Belgium originally called Druppel. The creator, Dries Buytaert, planned originally on calling it Dorp (which means Village in Dutch), but he introduced a typo when filling out the domain registration, and liked the way that it sounded. The idea behind it was simple - build a CMS system that promoted the concept of community rather than simply being a way to store content. To do this, Drupal was build early on around the idea of content nodes (think of them as very simple documents with a title and body) and the heavy use of syndication.

Drupal has long been just underneath the radar. My first encounter with it was in 2003, when I became involved with a group of programmers supporting the Howard Dean campaign, where we settled upon Drupal as a good foundation for an easy to roll out web CMS that could support local grassroot groups. Part of the ability of the Dean campaign to raise funds on what amounted to a shoestring budget could be effectively attributed to the Druapl implementation, at the time dubbed DeanSpace. After the election, the developers submitted the extensions back into the Drupal code base as CivicSpace, and this is still one of the most widely used open source political sites to date.

Drupal gained further clout with the rise of blogging in 2004-2005, and much of the functionality that has been added to Drupal has served only to strengthen this blogging capability. The company Bryght was founded in Vancouver in 2004 to sell hosted Drupal services, and along the way significantly pushed Drupal into the spotlight as one of the premier blogging and social networking platforms (Bryght was recently acquired by sibling Vancouver company Raincity Studios, combining a cutting edge web design company with the hosting services Bryght itself provides.

Drupal has gone through a number of iterations, and just recently released its Version 6.0 release. Having worked with it myself in its beta incarnation, I have to commend the many open source developers who put in countless hours in this version - Drupal is finally coming into its own as perhaps one of the best web platforms out there … and the irony is that blogging, while still an integral part of its underlying system, has taken a back seat to its extensive use of taxonomies, feed manipulations and effective use of AJAX systems.

The Power of Classified Syndication

One of the more intriguing sites I’ve seen recently is the just released Eureka! Science News site. I’m something of a science junkie, and regularly monitor feeds from Scientific American, the National Science Foundation, Discovery, and many other sites. The idea behind Eureka! is relatively simple - they subscribe to the same data feeds and a host of others, but use a processing algorithm on all incoming content to apply classications to them automatically. Michael Imbeault, the brains behind Eureka, described his own frustrations with existing tools that motivated his search for a new solution:

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Courtesy : http://www.oreillynet.com