Community, OSL and Sun Jump to Drupal's Rescue

Robert Douglass writes "Drupal asked for help and received a major dose of it. Sun Microsystems has stepped up and donated a Sun Fire V20z server which will be the backbone of Drupal's new server architecture at the Open Source Lab. Furthermore, over $10,000 in donations were collected in a matter of a couple days (thanks to all the people who responded to the previous /. post!), plus thousands more in pledges from groups like Apress and CivicSpaceLabs... looks like the community loves Drupal!"

I've got pictures!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures [nyud.net] of the Sun equipment. Coral Cahed to boot.

Damn I'm a nice guy!

Drupal still on the old server

[Robert Douglass]

As you can tell from the way the drupal.org site is (not) responding, it is still being run from the old server.

Re:Solaris

[tu_holmes]

It doesn't really matter, but I can say it won't be Sparc linux...

The V20z is an AMD Opteron server.

It will either run Solaris x86 or Linux (the non-sparc version).

Re:New /. Feature?

[Zweideutig]

Drupal is a content management system, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal [wikipedia.org] if you want a description.

Re:Opinions on Drupal

[eric_brissette]

Check out http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] I really dig Mambo.. they take the firefox approach and make a solid CMS infrastructure with the basic features most people need and the community creates components/modules to extend that functionality... some free, some not.

Re:Opinions on Drupal

[SolusSD]

I threw together a personal Drupal site in a matter of minutes: www.uwcreations.com straight forward/easy to use, but very powerful. I also use mambo.. but while it seems more flexible, it can be a nightmare compared to drupal.

Drupal Info

[Dakrin1]

Oh, and I was curious what drupal was too, the slashdot link doesn't give much more info than that it's a CMS, and drupal.org is down (looks like they haven't installed the new hardware in time for slashdot).

Here's the wikipedia with link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]

Drupal is a content management framework, content management system and blogging engine which was originally written by Dries Buytaert and is the software used to power Debian Planet [1], Terminus1525 [2], Spread Firefox [3] and Kernel Trap [4], among others. Drupal is written in PHP using strict coding standards.

Drupal is the English spelling for the Dutch word 'druppel' which means 'drop'.

Though it started as a small bulletin board system, Drupal has become much more than just a news portal, thanks to its flexible architecture. Drupal has a basic layer, or core, which supports pluggable modules that enable additional behaviors. The modules available for Drupal provide a wide assortment of features, including e-commerce systems, workflow, photo galleries, mailing list management, and CVS integration. Drupal's taxonomy/classification module is especially interesting, in that it allows any content to be classified with a flexible tagging system.

Some of the more special roles that Drupal has filled include company intranets, online classrooms, art communities and project management. Many feel that Drupal's focus on user communities is what makes it stand out from its competition.

Re:Server overkill?

[garcia]

With the unexpected server donation from Sun, could the money raised have been better spent on something other than more servers?

If you had read the linked information from the blurb you would have found out that the Drupal team decided that putting all the money towards server/backend stuff is what the community would want.

The community thought that they money they were donating was for a server to host Drupal at the OSL. When the donations went *way* over what Drupal originally needed the staff still felt that it should remain w/the server side.

They also mentioned that they might have used some of that money to start up the Drupal Foundation but decided that additional money, already promised to them by various sources, would go to that instead (i.e. Summer of Code by Google).

Re:Opinions on Drupal

[drewzhrodague]

Drupal seems to be a far better CMS than PHPNuke was, I had created a whole bunch of websites using PHPNuke.

PHPNuke [phpnuke.org] was great at the beginning, until kiddies started using the thing to send SPAM, post SPAM, and generally piss me off. Manual process to deal with that kind of crap.

Drupal seems to have a couple of modules that let you deal with SPAM, though I haven't investigated it enough yet.

I like how modular the code is, and I haven't needed to edit the Drupal code to make it do what I want, like I had to with PHPNuke.

We're working on changing WiFiMaps.com [wifimaps.com] over to Drupal, and I've alrealdy converted Recruiter-Rater [zhrodague.net] over, using a nuke2drupal conversion script -- quite painless!

Re:The name confused me 100%

[f-bomb]

That's because drupal has their own development infrastructure and does not use sourceforge's services. Just because a project isn't hosted on sourceforge doesn't mean its not relevant. I switched to drupal from Post-Nuke about 6 months ago and will never go back.

Re:Opinions on Drupal

[garcia]

See here [lazylightning.org] for how I used a Bash script to integrate a random Gallery v1 image into Drupal.

Slashdot won't let me post it anonymously, sorry.

Re:Opinions on Drupal

[afinn]

Drupal is an excellent piece of software. Compared to other CMSs it is fast, modular, has a clean codebase and a gentle learning curve. I recently started using it after messing around with various other CMS systems over the last couple of years.

To be honest its the first one that has really impressed me. I looked at slashcode [slashcode.com], scoop [kuro5hin.org], zope [zope.org], plone [plone.org], postnuke [postnuke.com], mambo [mamboserver.com].

When I started using drupal I got the same feeling as when I started using Mac OS X. To continue the OS analogy postnuke and phpnuke are more like windows whereas zope and plone are kinda linux of the CMS world.

Re:Drupal Info

[Dakrin1]

... sorry about that comment, its my browser that was the trouble and wasn't displaying it correctly.