The Drupal distribution of the day, OpenPublish

Image via CrunchBase

I knew Drupal thanks to OpenPublish. I had a client who needed to have a website with online publishing capabilities. And reading the OpenPublish documentation I realized that it was going to fit my client’s needs. So after downloading it, translating it and making minor fixes to the theme, I had the website running in almost no time. And my client was (and still is) very happy with it.

I will not go into detail on the features of OpenPublish. I will just say that it fits most of the use cases of small and medium publishers in Latin America. There are many reasons for choosing a Drupal distribution versus starting a site from scratch. The most important reason to me was that I had a system running out-of-the-box.  It saved me lots of weeks of work figuring out how to configure the different modules and make them work. In the case of OpenPublish, it also semantic web functionality embedded, such as the OpenCalais module (which is very nice).

Downsides of using Drupal distribution? Well, maintaining it might be really hard, I would say that with some distributions you need to be prepared to take over the maintenance of your installed distribution once you install it. But that depends on the distribution itself. I don’t picture myself maintaining OpenAtrium, and OpenScolar.

Thing is, we need to get used to distributions. We can’t start websites from scratch and most of these distributions already make the right decisions for most of the client’s use cases.

Related Articles

• Open Atrium: A Drupal Based Intranet Ecosystem (cmswire.com)
• Acquia Offers New Drupal Distribution for Higher Education (eon.businesswire.com)

Drupal 7 and the semantic web

Image via Wikipedia

Drupal 7 will be released when it is ready, which means it will be out when the number of critical issues goes down to 0. Late september? Early october? Good news are it will be ready soon, and many of its most popular modules will be ready for Drupal 7 as soon as it is out.

There is a lot to say about releasing the new version when it is ready. But I think doing so is great, Drupal 7 will hit the street when its developers feel confident it will be up to the expectations  (I have seen many software packages being released when they were not tested enough).

Other than that, Drupal 7 ships with many things, including RDFa support in core. Its first consequence will be, we will see thousands of Drupal sites generating semantically marked data. Which will be great because that will be the compelling event for many developers writing software that consumes semantic data.

I will not go into details on how Drupal and its RDFa support will work. Just want to say that if you want to try it now, download OpenPublish which comes with RDF support. Besides, you have to try OpenCalais, which is a Reuters service which is great. But if you want to get into the Drupal and RDF world, just check out the Semantic-Drupal website.

Now, if you want to know the impact of the semantic web, just check out how Best Buy increased its search traffic with semantic web technologies.

Related Articles

• Calais Module for Drupal | OpenCalais (opencalais.com)
• RDF in Drupal: Super-Simple Primer | DrupalEasy (drupaleasy.com)
• SPARQL | drupal.org (drupal.org)
• Grid Systems, Drupal and Semantics (why CSS frameworks are not that bad in Drupal) (webschuur.com)