"Front End Drupal" / Slashdot Article
I'm a big fan of the website Slashdot [ http://slashdot.org ], and today there was a recent post concerning Drupal:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/18/139218&art_pos=2
I'm interested in DRUPALug's perspective (on both the article, and, of course, the comments).
it emerged a while ago.
Tom Scola and Image Works, to name 2.
http://drupal.org/node/694998
http://vitalsignsme.org/
Thanks for the links. I am looking more for stuff like this:
and running on Amazon AWS or inside an rPath or AppZero virtual machine.
I have strong conviction that Drupal and CMS distributions in general have huge possibilities. My take is that it will shift away from the large portals that companies only hope will spur a creative community around a brand and shift towards smaller user inspired portals. Cloud hosted apps that will need the front-end design to be more intuitive to or accessible to non-developers.
You could draw parallels between some particular micro-blogging apps that might target only a 150 contributors. The distinction between micro-blogging and CMS is the deep flexibility of attaching and tagging content with CMS so that it is might be search-able or even able to be distributed to other CMS installs with related businesses or user groups. Real time opportunity distribution.
I'm encouraged to see nearly a handful of companies with footprints the Portland area (Dana and Imageworks being one) that might be able to develop some very unique target CMS distributions (not necessarily Drupal) and provide them to the community with support behind them. Designing monolithic CMS sites that depend on the businesses starving for capital is going to be a steady but declining trend in my view. However it happens, someone will need to design the front end for a targeted use.
Hi Mike,
TechMaine has been a proponent of what Drupal can add to community building; it's the primary reason we selected that as our CMS and CiviCRM as our CRM.
There are indeed a number of 'silos' out there; unfortunately many of them function to make communities more homogenous than they may already be. The goal is now to find the right apps/module that will enable our site users to build niche portals and have their content more easily found within the larger tech community focused on Maine.
I am struggling to find a cohesive vision of what constitutes 'the
integrated web portal'. Looking at the IT portfolio of a typical
enterprise you see lots of service portlets and a vigorous industry
developing around automating the service catalog, deployment and
cloud-readying of these portlets. That is a far cry from the Drupal,
Joomla, etc. CMS crowd and the federated security models and single sign
on infrastructures needed for integrating all these services and
applications.
Then further complicating matters is the rapid expansion of mobile
platforms such as Apple iPhone and iPad and other smartphones and the
unique software architectures that particular Apple forces on
application developers. I am attracted to the concept behind
technologies like Titanium from Appcelerator but history has shown that
the likelihood for success of such middleware is low: business people
rather want to be economically locked in with an Apple or Google or
Microsoft as compared to a small middleware company. The reason of
course is perceived longevity of the endeavor. However, I think Apache
is becoming an example where business is starting to get comfortable to
being locked-in to an open source framework instead of competing
offerings from Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.
I came to Drupal to try to find out if it could be the vehicle to build
a coherent integrated web portal for a Web 2.0 company but I am not
convinced that it has the richness needed to support the security and
automation needs of a federated system. I love to be educated in this
respect if I am not correct, but finding solutions around integration
into a SAML framework or federation into a data warehouse or third party
wiki (think Sharepoint) appears unpleasant if one starts from a PHP
based CMS. And if you can't integrate into the ERP-CRM-KM systems then
it appears that the technology cannot be the core and is relegated to
the periphery.
Opinions?
On 7/23/2010 12:53 PM, mikew.rfc wrote:
>
Did you go through the book and its examples? I would love to see some Drupal design expertise emerge in Maine.