Dries Buytaert

Drupal memory lane

I was recently interviewed by Janani Gopalakrishnan for the July 2007 issue of Linux For You, the leading Linux and Open Source magazine in India.

Call it a web application platform, a content management system, a blogging engine, a bulletin board system, or a ‘community plumbing’ framework (as the team loves to call it), there is no denying that Drupal, now in avatar 5.1, is spreading its wings across the Web rather swiftly. We travel down memory lane with its founder and creator Dries Buytaert to the days of drop.org, and travel forth with him through its evolution into the popular Drupal.

It was an extremely fun interview and as we progressed good memories came roaring right back. From the early days when Drupal was nothing more than an internal message board, to the first real Drupal conference in 2005.

The resulting article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attributions 2.5 license, so feel free to download a copy (or to remix and redistribute it with attribution).

The Luck of Seven interview

I was interviewed by Noel Noneck as part of his The Luck of Seven journey. Click the image to see the interview.

Drupal is a Webware 100 winner

The Drupal community deserves a lot of praise for their hard work and dedication, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Drupal is a CNET Webware 100 winner in the publishing category. Good job team!

This is what CNET has to say about the results in the publishing category:

"Publishing had no mass consumer brands in the top 10, as most of the other categories did. WordPress got the most votes. I was interested to see the Drupal CMS platform placing high in this category -- above the consumer-oriented publishing products Typepad and Vox. Even combined, these two Six Apart services didn't come close to winning the same number of votes as Drupal."

De Morgen interview

On March 15, Flemish newspaper De Morgen published an article about the fact that Drupal is being used by various candidates in the 2008 race for the US presidency.

While that is great information to share, the article is overly sensational, focuses too much on me rather than on the Drupal community, and comes with the seemingly obligatory Bill Gates reference. Sigh!

Credit should be given where credit is due: Drupal's successes should be attributed to the Drupal community, of which I am just one part.

Datanews interview

Olivier Fabes interviewed me about Drupal for Datanews, a Belgian IT magazine. You can find the article in the January 26 issue. I think the interview came out well.

Trends interview

André Gilain interviewed me about Drupal for Trends, a Belgian business magazine. You can find the article in the June 15 issue of Trends Tendances (French version), or you can read it in full by clicking the link below.

This is really good publicity for Drupal, and it is exciting to see our work getting so much recognition.

I'm not sure that I like being called the "anti-Bill Gates" -- it is not like I'm a modern hippy fighting windmills, am I? I wish that the article was more about Drupal and the Drupal community, and less about me. Credit should be given where credit is due: Drupal's successes should be attributed to the Drupal community, of which I am just one part.

Drupal loves the OSL

Recently a reporter asked me to comment on the Open Source Lab (OSL). The OSL provides free hosting and support for the Mozilla Foundation, Debian, Gentoo Linux, Drupal, and many other FOSS projects. My comment made it into an interview with Scott Kveton, associate director of OSL, published at NewsForge:

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert says his project's hardware -- two dedicated Web servers, one dedicated database server, and another email/CVS server -- was provided by Drupal and set up with the help of the OSL, which provides bandwidth and power. "OSL helped us architect the setup, and installed all the machines," Buytaert says. "In addition, and this is invaluable on its own, they help us with the day-to-day maintenance of the Drupal infrastructure (e.g. backups, upgrades, troubleshooting). You know, it is still hard to believe that they give us such a remarkable service ... for free. It isn't very often that one gets offered a deal like this. It is safe to say that OSL is one of the Drupal project's key contributors."