IBM DeveloperWorks chooses Drupal as its Platform!

Drupal is my CMS of choice. IBM’s has chosen Drupal as its blogging platform and here is a piece to explain why? The post here does a very good comparison! What do you think?

Figure 3 shows a comparison of how the candidates met our requirements. It was obvious that we needed something more than the blog engines could provide.

Figure 3. Rating the candidates based on requirements

Mambo was very appealing from the ease of install and the UI, but the development track at the time was fractured and didn’t give us any confidence of support.

Typo3 seemed to have a huge community and the maturity we were looking for. However, the learning curve for using Typo3 is daunting in comparison to Drupal.

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we’ll revisit these and any new entries in the field.

Drupal in detail

Drupal contains many built-in features and is easily extensible with a vibrant community supporting and adding to the portfolio of additional features. The basic features include:

• Friendly URLs using Apache’s mod_rewrite capability
• Easily extensible using Drupal’s module framework (The community has developed many useful modules that provide functions such as taxonomy display, jabber authentication, private messages, bookmarks, and so on.)
• A personalization environment for individualized content and presentation based on user preferences
• Role-based permission system to define access to the viewing and editing of content
• Content is fully indexed to support search
• Drupal is written on top of a database abstraction layer, so the framework can be easily extended to other database back ends
• Support for other content forms such as polls, threaded comments, and discussions and content syndication
• Separation of content from styling in a templating system that uses HTML, CSS, and PHP
• Administrative support for logging, analysis, and Web-based administration
• Online help