Diving into Drupal

By John McKinney / Mar 12, 2009 / No Comments

Drupal Logo Now more than ever, I think it is safe to say that Open Source frameworks have become a necessity for our complex web development needs in these less than favorable economic times. That being said, many web developers have a hard time choosing a framework or CMS that will be able to scale to any type of challenge that we face, without having to delve into core modifications and hacks. There are great solutions for all ends of the spectrum — WordPress for the more content-oriented user versus CakePHP or Zend for the straight up programmer, but it is rare that you can find something that takes the best features of these frameworks and can wrap them all up in one package. Drupal is a framework that aims to encapsulate everything from a fully customizable, user friendly CMS to low level code access to your database ORM. Not to mention that Drupal’s massive user base can provide for you through its incredibly vast (and rapidly growing) community.

There are all sorts of meetups and conferences (including last week’s DrupalCon in Washington, DC) taking place all over the world. Any aspiring developer can simply register with the community at groups.drupal.org to take full advantage of a universe of shared code.

Dave Novelli and I, of Koroberi’s partner web development company Ashe Avenue Development, attended DrupalCampNYC 6 on Saturday, Feb 28th. In what was described as the largest turnout in the New York group’s history, we were able to help dictate the course of the day as soon as we arrived. In fact, even the New York Times was in attendance for the entire seminar. Here we could attend lectures and classes about everything from installing your first Drupal instance to managing your CDN with the Memcache module. We opted for talks on module development, mobile applications with transcoded templates, and some top level workshops on templating and block scripting.

With Drupal 6 (the most current version available now) developers have been given greater control to create and share anything from personal blog sites to massive online media architecture. With a seemingly endless pool of resource provided by a large portion of the community, it is no wonder that companies such as MTV/Viacom choose to base their major enterprise applications in Drupal.