drupal

It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems

in blog & cms, cwonline05, drupal, social networks & collaboration

Presentation submitted for Computers and Writing Online 2005

Co-authored by Charles Lowe and Dries Buytaert, May 2005

This article is a work-in-progress, a draft for a chapter being submitted to a Computers and Writing edited collection on databases. Use the links below the abstract and/or to the right in the navigation block to begin reading this multi-page hypertext. Or you can view a pdf version.

Abstract

In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the "About Drupal" page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications known as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct:

  • content management
  • weblog
  • discussion-based community software
  • collaboration
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16 May

High-profile Grassroots Journalism Site Chooses Drupal

Posted by Dennis G. Jerz in drupal, internet, new media, open source

From Bayosphere (http://bayosphere.com/why-drupal):

Grassroots Journalism, Creative Commons, and Open Source Software share visions of the free flow of ideas. There are countless Open Source content management systems, several of which could have served as an excellent starting point for Bayosphere, but we chose Drupal for its combination of flexibility, community and maturity.

Drupal has a stellar philosophy of extensibility. On an old school CMS, changing the system's behavior required changing the software package's source code. Eventually the package requires an upstream upgrade (for security fixes, if nothing else), and a programmer has to reapply every local custom change ever made, an often-tedious and sometimes-impossible task.

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03 May

It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems

Posted by cel4145 in cwonline05, drupal, social networks & collaboration, virtual communities

Abstract submitted for Computers and Writing Online 2005

Co-authored by Charles Lowe and Dries Buytaert

In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the About page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications know as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct:

  • content management
  • weblog
  • discussion-based community software
  • collaboration
Read more »
22 Mar

Ourmedia: an Open Repository of Multimedia Texts

Posted by cel4145 in drupal, new media, open content

In looking at some new sites recently, I stumbled upon a great new project running on Drupal for expanding the public commons. In conjunction with Internet Archive, Bryght, Creative Commons and Wikipedia, Ourmedia is offering " free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches."

As David Bollier points out,

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20 Dec

Top 10 Weblog Tools in 2004

Posted by Clancy in blog & cms, drupal, open source

From About.com: A top-10 list of weblog tools, interpreted loosely to include moblog applications, an aggregator, and a browser. (Keep in mind that the author says she has only tried three or four weblog clients.) I was pleasantly surprised to see a pretty decent representation of open source software, with WordPress, Drupal, and Firefox making the list.