Drupal gains ground down under

Two years ago, Drupal's lead developer, Dries Buytaert, told Computerworld Australia that his five-year goal was to see many more people using Drupal in many more places to build increasingly complex websites. With a number of attention-gaining Drupal sites launched around the world since then, it seems that Buytaert is on his way to achieving that goal.

“This is certainly the pattern that I've seen throughout the rest of the world. First, there are many small sites and eventually a few higher profile Drupal sites launch. This generates a great deal of enthusiasm in local Drupal communities because it validates the work that so many people do, generating momentum for new Drupal opportunities,” he says.

There are now more than 400,000 Drupal sites around the world, and drupal.org has a million unique visitors per month.

While Drupal does not make up the whole of Simon Roberts' open source consulting business, it plays an increasingly important part.

Taniwha Solutions, which started in New Zealand and has been in Australia for four years, is responsible for developing about 20 professional Drupal sites, including work for the discovery channel and several community portals.

“I was personally involved in the Drupal community - as a hobbyist initially - but more people started asking me to help them out with this or that. So we started to offer Drupal support and services professionally and add it to our portfolio. Since then we have hired three Drupal developers.”

Roberts says that although Wordpress and PHP-nuke may look nicer out of the box, they are more difficult to extend and maintain.

“As Drupal's community continues to grow, the pace and breadth of development will too,” he says.

Simon Hobbs and his Melbourne-based company, Em Space, is responsible for establishing about about 20 Drupal sites, including one for Lonely Planet. The company's sole business is in building Drupal-based websites for government, not-for-profit organisations and enterprise clients. Hobbs reviewed several systems when setting up his business about five years ago. These included Joomla (then called Mambo) and TYPO3.

“They all try to do the same thing: enable you to create websites out of the box. But at the end of the day you are also looking for something that is a framework that you can build upon as well as something you can design how ever you want and make it look how you need it,” he says.

“I eliminated Joomla at the time because it did not have the same clean structure as Drupal. There were a few key features that Drupal also did a lot better out of the box. The best one being the URL alias [which enables you to] have a clean URL eternally pointed to a page,” he says.

Hobbs admits Joomla has a better reputation for corporate-style websites that are clean and tight-looking and that Drupal for a long time has had a reputation of looking really ugly out of the box. He also said that Drupal had a steeper learning curve than Joomla, but it was a worthwhile one for the additional features you gain.

The framework around Drupal also appealed to Hobbs, which is, he says, a very important consideration to take in to account when assessing open source projects to base a business upon

Justin Freeman decided to base his Canberra web development business, Agileware on Drupal after initially trying Joomla. His company now creates around four Drupal-based sites per month.

Freeman says he chose Drupal over Joomla for a variety of reasons, but his choice was always going to be open source.

“My focus has always been around open source and about encouraging customers to use the power of open source to reduce cost, time-to-market and development time,” he says.

“Prior to starting this business I was working as a consultant and watching massive enterprise projects burning up a lot of time and money and delivering very little in terms of ROI and outcomes. At the same time I was watching Linux and the open source scene mature and I thought not enough people were out there working with it. People don't market open source so I wanted to set up a company that championed open source projects.”

Freeman says Joomla is developed more for designers and Drupal for developers.

“Joomla is very popular with graphic designers, but it gets very hard as soon as you want to get behind the scenes and do some integration work or extend some modules in a particular way.”

Taniwha’s Roberts says the challenges around legalities, licensing and warranties with open source are becoming less of an issue as Apache, Linux and PHP become increasingly 'mainstream'. However, there is still a challenge in selling the open source ethic to clients.

“I haven't had a problem selling Drupal as such, but there is still a little bit of a cultural difference when dealing with corporate customers. Some clients will let you distribute interesting modules back to the community. Other clients will want to hang on to it and not let you donate it back to the community because they are thinking that their software is part of their competitive advantage,” he says.