Dries Buytaert

IBM developerWorks has started a new series entitled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative website.

In the series, IBM's Internet Technology Group team describes a fictitious organization that requires a website that includes document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, etc. Because no turnkey solution is available they are faced with the task to extend and customize one of the available Open Source content management systems. After reviewing numerous Open Source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type and Wordpress, IBM decided to use Drupal to illustrate the creation of this website:

Drupal is a relative youngster compared to other content management systems. However, we got the impression the framework was well written, robust, very extensible, and seemed to have a thriving development community that was generating a lot of adoption and support ...

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal.

What makes this series invaluable is that the articles are written around the basic premise that customization is a necessity. It reinforces that, if we want to create the best content management system in the world, we should focus on making Drupal (i) easier to use, (ii) easier to develop for, and (iii) easier to theme.