centre{source}

At CentreSource, we have a motto that “outcomes always outweigh the output.”  Through this, we try to focus on meeting the individual goals of our clients, versus focusing on the process of how they get done.  One goal we often hear is that our clients would like an easy way to update the website themselves.  By using a Content Management System (CMS), we enable our clients to accomplish this — without having to install anything on their computers, or know too much about how websites work.

Over the history of CentreSource, we’ve worked hard to choose the perfect CMS to be able to meet the individual needs of each client and project that comes our way.  There was always a balance that had to be struck — it couldn’t be too cookie-cutter, or else we wouldn’t be able to do everything that the client was asking.  Conversely, it wouldn’t be cost efficient if we had to custom build a CMS for our clients each time.  By focusing on the outcome  (the client’s goal of an easy-to-update website), we decided that the best single CMS option was not a single option at all, but instead a “toolbox” approach that would allow us to use the appropriate tool for each unique job.

Continue reading "Choosing the Right Tool for the Job"...

The folks at pingVision have posted their case study for the Popular Science Magazine website on drupal.org.

I attended this session and left it feeling very inspired. It was amazing to see what this small crew did with such a behemoth of a site. Just the thought of having to migrate a 1.66GB Oracle DB into a Drupal site makes me sweat. All things considered, I felt like this was probably the best session I attended at DrupalCon 2008. It wasn’t the nerdiest, or the geekiest, and it didn’t have lots of slides of code…but for our line of work, it was incredibly valuable. Not only did they go into the “nuts-n-bolts” of how they built the site, they also touched on the project management side, and also managing client expectations with such a large project.

Continue reading "DrupalCon 2008: Popular Science Magazine Case Study"...

Addison Berry from Lullabot has posted the slides from his DrupalCon 2008 presentation: Contributing to Drupal: A guide for everyone.
Woot!

John VanDyk, author of Pro Drupal Development, and longtime Drupal developer/guru, has posted the slides and video of the presentation he gave at DrupalCon on triggers and actions. It was great presentation from one of Drupal’s founding fathers. Though centered around Drupal 6, many of the basic principals can be applied to Drupal 5’s Actions module. There is also word of backporting Triggers to Drupal 5!

If you missed the Boston DrupalCon 2008, don’t miss out on this wonderful session.
Files can be downloaded here…

In my last post I talked about the possibility of Doctrine being in the core of Drupal 7. After some thought, and a little bit of work, I realized this is not necessary. Doctrine can be used in Drupal now with a custom module I wrote. It comes with schema files and models for the drupal core database schema so you can begin using Doctrine models immediately for interacting with your Drupal website database.

The Drupal 7 development has started in the last couple of weeks and the Doctrine bug has been planted in the ear of the Drupal development team. Hopefully the power of Doctrine can be recognized and utilized to take Drupal and Doctrine both to the next level. You can find the discussion between myself and “chx” here.

At CentreSource, much of our web development utilizes the Drupal open source content management system. From custom websites to large scale corporate websites, Drupal offers many modules for flexibility, personalization, and customizable URLs that are search engine and end user friendly.

The technical definition of Drupal is:
Drupal is a web-based content management system. Text and pointers to other kinds of content are stored in a database, dynamically retrieved and composed, and presented to a user in response to a request sent via a web-browser.

CentreSource offers our congratulations to the open source Drupal community as Drupal Wins the Overall Open Source Content Managment System Award for 2007.

Continue reading "Drupal Wins Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award"...

As we use and deploy more CMS software, we have been increasingly wondering what the differences exactly between Mambo and Joomla are. I knew that Joomla was a fork of Mambo, but I wasn’t clear on why they forked. Fortunately, I found this excellent article that takes a tour of the turmoil and history surrounding Mambo and Joomla.

Next I hope to find (or write!) a more comprehensive comparison of the direction that the two teams intend to take with the software.