Choosing Drupal

Drupal: With a fast-growing user base in the non-profit sector, Drupal’s strong online community focus made it an appealing prospect. Nonetheless we were concerned about documentation and interface issues and its wiki support. Our wiki concerns were resolved by a demonstration of a Drupal site with installed wiki-like features that fully met our needs. Documentation remains a concern but appears to be a priority for both Bryght and CivicSpace, two major players in the Drupal community. Likewise an improved administrative interface is high on the development agenda at CivicSpace, and may be partly manageable in the shorter run by implementing a custom theme for administrators.

Most importantly, Drupal was alone among all CMS options in its compatibility with a distributed network approach. The platform is essentially built for exactly this kind of approach: it supports ubiquitous outbound RSS feeds, complex aggregation of inbound feeds, per-feed or per-item non-exclusive tagging, and native support for blogging. Compared to the other options, which are virtually all CMS platforms that have developed distributed community features, Drupal is innately oriented towards community networking and distributed content creation. The following outlines how we anticipate using particular features of the Drupal platform to support core elements of the telecentre.org web strategy.