Guess what? There’s a lot of content being authored for the web, and there’s no end in sight. Perhaps the oldest challenge of the modern web is how to bridge the gap between those who are creative and have content and those with the means to structure and present such content in a web browser. There are creative writers and artists with no interest in the technology and there are structured thinkers who command the technology.
To the rescue comes the nearly ubiquitous content management system (or CMS but not a course management system…that’s a different breed of application).
Content management systems are torn between two fundamental poles: one hand wishes to preserve creativity and flexibility, while the other hand aims to make things simple. These goals, more often than not, are opposed to each other. As one increases the simplicity of a CMS, the ability to tweak, move, modify, and control the result all diminish. Alternately, if one is given complete freedom inside a CMS, it begs the question: why have a CMS at all if creating content is as complex as it would be without one? It is in this light which Drupal sets itself apart from other CMS's.
Drupal has a near-perfect blend of structure and form with freedom and creativity. By providing a structure that addresses 90% of the problem space, and a lightweight development environment for the remaining 10%, it becomes easy not only to manage content, but keep it current as well. However, this built in flexibility allows for Drupal to be used in ways that would be much more difficult for other CMS's, and radically changes the way things can be presented on the web.
Web technologies evolve quickly. Drupal – with a very large population of users and developers – is keeping pace. With a low barrier of entry into Drupal development, this CMS constantly grows with the addition of modules each providing new functionality (see the list of modules at http://drupal.org). Drupal’s flexibility can be leveraged as a front end that can be adapted quickly and provide an up to date interface to existing applications. An example is Longsight’s recent work for the Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository in which DSpace serves as the archival engine while Drupal provides a strong user interface including the ability to harvest metadata from disparate and distributed repositories.
Drupal goes well beyond a content management system by providing tools for social interactivity, fine-grained access control of database resources, strong graphic design and extensibility. Drupal combines the best of creative and structured thinking!
Some of Longsight’s Drupal-based projects include:
