British Government using Drupal
The British Government is using Drupal on an innovation initiative to encourage developers and designers share new ideas and showcase their work: see http://innovate.direct.gov.uk. Directgov’s main site, http://www.direct.gov.uk is the official government website for citizens. It provides information and services from across government organizations.
The Industry Standard using Drupal and Mollom
The online media industry continues to face readership and revenue challenges. They are burdened with the task of not only providing the content but gaining more user interaction in the form of reader comments. Comments by readers are beneficial to sites because they show created readership and mean more eyeballs to that particular page or article. For publishers, more eyeballs means more revenue.
The Industry Standard is a news and analysis site owned by IDG, a large publishing organization that publishes over 300 magazines in 85 countries!
The Industry Standard re-launched on Drupal in 2008 with the goal of engaging with new readers and encouraging them to contribute comments and content. They also wanted to allow readers to comment anonymously, something that most news sites do not do. The Industry Standard felt that anonymity gave readers more freedom to express their comments, and would encourage more frequent and detailed commentary while expanding traffic and tying the publication into the many other online conversations taking place around technology.
Ian Lamont, The Industry Standard's managing editor, had prior experience managing online communities, and knew that the relaunched publication would need a comment filter that could encourage quality comments while sifting out spam and trolls.
According to Lamont, having anonymous comments is hugely important to The Industry Standard. "We really believe that most people don't want to deal with the hassle of registration. Because we are relatively small, if we only had registered comments, there would be far less reader engagement on the site. As it is now, we can have dialogues with unregistered users, which is really important to building voice and an online identity."
The Industry Standard is using Mollom to help them remove the barrier to visitor participation, allowing readers to comment anonymously and eliminate spam vandalism. Since the re-launch in 2008, Mollom has blocked 800k spam messages in 539 days and blocked more than a thousand attempts a day with peaks up to several thousands a day. Cool!
Drupal 7 code freeze: status update and next steps
It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.
First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay (see screenshot). Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.
Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.
My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!
Gartner puts Drupal in visionaries quadrant
A lot of Drupal people and organizations help promote Drupal. At Acquia, we also like to help with promoting Drupal. One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work is carried out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several analyst calls myself. Recently, Gartner has included Drupal into its Magic Quadrant reports, and was most recently promoted to the 'Visionaries' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.
Last year, Gartner classified Drupal as a 'niche player', meaning Drupal does well in a segment of a market, but that we had limited ability to innovate or outperform competitors. In this year's report, which was released last week, Drupal was promoted to the 'visionaries' category right next to Google and other big players. According to Gartner, visionaries align with Gartner's view of how a market will evolve, but they have yet to deliver against that vision.
Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about Drupal's pomotion: "Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support."
Why does this matter? As most of you know, there are hundreds of web content management systems and not everyone has the time or skill sets to figure out what system to use. Plus, large organizations that are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt.
This is exactly why I started Acquia, and how Acquia can add value to the Drupal community. You might notice that neither Joomla! nor Wordpress are to be found on this graph, and that is probably because they have not been able to position themselves with analyst firms. By maintaining relationships with all of these analysts, and showing them all the great work we have done, we can get Drupal to the next level in terms of enterprise adoption. Needless to say, from my perspective, this is a big deal for all of us in the community, as it provides tremendous validation for Drupal, and will create more business for everyone in the community.
Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
Big, exciting news! The flag ship website of the U.S. government, Whitehouse.gov, just relaunched on Drupal. This is a big day for Drupal, and for Open Source in government, and something all of us in the community should be very proud of.
First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama's push for an open and transparent government -- Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.
Second, this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal. It takes time to understand these things and to bring this change, so I congratulate the Obama administration for taking such an important leadership role in considering Open Source solutions.
Being one of the world's largest consumers of computer software, the U.S. government is not new to Drupal. Several agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration have been using Drupal, for example. Drupal adoption is growing rapidly within the U.S. government. However, Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal goes above and beyond any other Drupal installation within the U.S. government, and is a fantastic testament for Drupal and Open Source. It will raise awareness about Drupal across the U.S. government, and across all governments world-wide.
Personally, I'm thrilled by the idea that Drupal can help governments provide greater transparency, higher velocity, and more flexibility.
Disclosure: my company Acquia was involved in the development of Whitehouse.gov in partnership with General Dynamics Information Technology, Phase2 Technology, Akamai, and Terremark Federal Group. Additional details can be found in this TechPresident post (PDF version).
