Drupal sites
usaspending.gov using Drupal
Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov earlier this week. Tim O'Reilly has all the details in his blog post titled Radical transparency: the new federal IT dashboard. In short, the dashboards are designed to help CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. The site was built with Drupal.
This is a fundamental change in the way government is going to be run, and it is great to see Drupal play a small role in that. Great stuff!
Radio Netherlands Worldwide using Drupal
Radio Netherlands Worldwide (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep in Dutch or RNW for short) is a public radio and television network based in The Netherlands. Radio Netherlands Worldwide is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions that began in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
What is interesting about the site is not the design or the implementation, but the fact that, after many years with Alterian (formerly Mediasurface), they switched to Drupal. Alterian is a supplier of proprietary content management systems, with their flagship product being Morello. The RNW started with the Internet early on (1992) and by doing so suffered from the law of the handicap of a head start: a history of dated, proprietary CMS-es that held them back from moving to the more current software.
RNW selected Drupal because of its multi-lingual capabilities (they support up to 6 languages, including Chinese and Arabic content) and Drupal's flexibility and agility. The migration to Drupal was done by Dutch Open Projects and took 3 months with a team of 5 people.
Bert Boerland, project manager at Dutch Open Projects, wrote the following on the switch to Drupal: By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolizes that companies that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary "prietpraat" are moving over! [The word prietpraat is Dutch and translates roughly to "childish non-sense".]
With both RNW and the Dutch public broadcaster NCRV using Drupal, and through Acquia's partnership with Woodwing (Woodwing is a Dutch company), the media landscape in Europe's low-lands has some critical mass to push Drupal into more traditional broadcasting companies. Drupal starts to disrupt the traditional, proprietary web content management space increasingly more.
With an editorial staff of over one hundred people, RNW publicizes dozens of postings a day including their own video and audio, and will soon incorporate even more, including user-generated content and content from their five-thousand-plus partner stations around the world. To keep all this content on track, RNW choose Drupal, coupled with the usual contributed modules (CCK and Views, FCKeditor, Pathauto, etc). They use Organic Groups as their core for separating and integrating their eleven editorial staffs. RNW gets lots of traffic from around the world and so, gets lots of spam, they are also a paying Mollom user; Mollom blocks hundreds of spam comments a day for them.
Edipresse blowing love kisses at Drupal
Pierre-Jean Duvivier, Head of WebFactory at Edipresse, shared some remarkable data points with me. Edipresse is one of Europe's biggest media and communications companies. It is a traditional print company that publishes more than 200 titles, including some leading European newspapers (i.e. Le Matin, Le Temps, and 24 heures).
Pierre-Jean told me that they converted 11 newspaper and magazine websites to Drupal in 18 months. The reason for adopting Drupal was that it is cheaper, faster, and more stable than their old content management system.
Today, some of Edipresse's biggest media properties are on a shared Drupal platform that delivers 30 million pages a month. Since they switched to Drupal, they cut their global IT cost by 75% and grew their online traffic by 220%. On average, it takes their internal Drupal team 40 days to migrate an existing newspaper site to Drupal, so I think we can expect to see more Edipress sites moving to Drupal.
I've mentioned it before. Many large media companies are in bad waters. Although traditional media companies have had enough advance warning that the internet was changing their game, either they underestimated the risk or they figured it wouldn't apply to them. Many have waited so long to embrace the web and to adjust their business models accordingly that their existence is now being threatened. With advertising revenues declining, and a global economic downturn upon us, life isn't getting easier as a traditional publisher. Edipresse has set a great example of how Drupal can be used to help turn the ship in a record time.
MIT Media Lab using Drupal
After CSAIL started using Drupal (the group where Tim-Berners Lee works), the MIT Media Lab also switched to Drupal. Check out there Drupal site at http://media.mit.edu. As a former academic and a long term admirer of the MIT Media Lab, I think that is just really cool!
IFRA using Drupal
IFRA, the world's leading association for newspaper and media publishing, knows how to set an example: they are switching their websites to Drupal.
IFRA has 3,000 members from the newspaper industry in about 80 countries. Besides staging the newspaper industry's largest international exhibition every year, IFRA also organizes more than 100 regional exhibitions, international conferences, seminars, workshops and training events worldwide.
Their main website, http://www.ifra.com, is already using Drupal. The migration to Drupal is still a work in progress, but according to Berger Schmidt, IFRA is switching all of its websites from Lotus Notes to Drupal this year.
Dutch government using Drupal
The Dutch government is using Drupal for the website of the State Service for Cultural Heritage. The site was built by Cinnamon.
French government portal using Drupal
After the French Ministry for Health, Youth and Sport using Drupal started using, the French government switched its official government portal to Drupal! Check it out at http://www.gouvernement.fr. Impressionnant!
The site was built by the French Government Multimedia Team and Adyax Experts (an Acquia partner). About 10 persons worked on it for several months. Most of the work was spent on building custom migration tools to switch from SPIP Agora to Drupal.
