![]() If your technology isn’t open source, it is by definition a black box with no ability to inspect or audit code. This creates a form of barrier to competition even from other open source projects. In this way, another key selling point to enterprises is Drupal’s longevity and the size of community it has built up during that time. It’s one thing to be able to integrate a new web service or emerging data standard, but you also have to have a very large and committed community, with members who can see sufficient benefit, in order to realise open source as an engine of contributed functionality. While open source enables innovation, the other key element is scale, which incentivises it. It’s worth pointing out that Drupal’s open source nature is only one side of the coin when it comes to community-driven innovation, as we see when commercial entities attempt to harness community efforts by open sourcing a controlled platform and frequently have very few, or low quality, contributions. In short, there is a clear distinction here between ability to lead new market trends, or trail behind them - and this has a definite business and planning impact. Where the cost benefits of any new integration or feature need to be evaluated, this is very often long after the market has already tried it out and made that decision clear. By contrast, in a proprietary software project, such features may take months or even years to go via their roadmap to release. Some examples of Drupal’s rapid innovation include Facebook and Twitter integration appearing within a few days of those services creating public APIs, and early adoption of emerging standards such as OAuth and semantic markup. It is no surprise then that this is a concern that strikes home to large organizations who have been watching these disruptions regularly unfold, and who have learnt that when it comes to what we are now coming to think of as digital services, the only constant is indeed change. This is one of its biggest selling points to enterprises who have seen the largest IT vendors struggle and typically fail to keep up with the pace of innovation on the Internet as the market has come to be dominated by what were until recently startups. ![]() The Drupal project has consistently demonstrated a pace of innovation which is unrivaled and impossible for even the largest organizations to compete with. ![]() What difference does open source make? Innovation. Open sourceĭrupal is one of the longest standing open source projects, having been actively developed since 2001. This brings a number of benefits to organizations who adopt it too, for example, much greater vendor transparency and no ‘roadmap prison’. Standardization in general is not only important to the Drupal project as a central cultural value but is also necessary for its distributed model of development. As a solution stack, LAMP is suitable for building dynamic web sites and web applications - Wikipedia LAMP is an acronym for an archetypal model of web service solution stacks, originally consisting of largely interchangeable components: Linux, the Apache HTTP Server, the MySQL relational database management system, and the PHP programming language. ![]() Standards-basedĭrupal is built on a standard LAMP architecture, the most common platform for modern web applications and sites. We shall look at Drupal in three ways: its characteristics, its features, and finally at some ways in which these have been applied. By no means comprehensive, the following attempts to give the newcomer a broad overview to understand the shape and contours of the elephant we call Drupal. ![]() in which a group of blind men are asked to determine what an elephant looks like by feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. ![]()
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