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The Drupal.org redesign team just released the results from their first major code sprint started in Portland, OR during OSCON in July.  This first release included a significant amount of infrastructure and under-the-hood implementation.  One of the visible portions of this sprint is the Solr search deployed by Achieve's CTO, Bill O'Connor (cveb10).  Achieve has been contributing code to Drupal.org redesign project since 2009. In 2010,  the Drupal Association made a strategic decision to hire five teams to complete the project.

The Drupal.org redesign team, including recently hired contractors, met in Portland last week to coordinate their efforts and generate a workable project plan.

Among the agreements in place are the scheduling of a development release on August 7th, and the planning of subsequent releases every two weeks after that until project completion.  Additionally, the team will be tracking issues in the public queues and meeting by phone three times each week.

The hiring of contractors was a difficult decision for the Drupal Association, but it was necessary in order to accelerate Drupal development and to enable the project team to appropriately address the highly complex technical issues involved in the redesign.

Achieve Internet is leading the Solr development portion of the project. Solr is a robust search platform used by many large Drupal web sites to improve search speed and capability. Solr works by housing an index of a site's Drupal data and arranging it for easy access via the Lucene Java search library.

Drupal.org is a huge site, with nearly a million pages, nearly a million users, and at least 8600 projects. Project manager Chris Strahl noted that this puts the Drupal.org redesign project on the same scale as some of the largest corporate website projects in the world.

The redesign goes far beyond aesthetic upgrades to include key functional improvements. The project module, for example, is evolving from a Drupal.org-specific tool to a true project management module with robust Views integration. Also, site searching will include the ability to search all *.drupal.org sites, so the information distributed in various areas (groups.drupal.org, for example) will be accessible via one search box. Add to this increased functionality the implications of the GIT migration, and it’s easy to see how significant this Drupal development effort is.

With such a huge project, no task is truly discrete, and sorting out some of the dependencies has been challenging.

APQC.org Goes Drupal

APQC is a best practices organization that provides information and research on benchmarking, knowledge management, measurement, and process improvement to its approximately 40,000 members. APQC’s somewhat rare in the web world because its product is its content. Obviously, a robust and flexible content management framework is critical.
 
In early May, APQC launched a new site in Drupal, the culmination of 6 months of effort. Achieve Internet led the development, beginning with analysis and planning sessions in October 2009. The major tasks were to migrate APQC’s content from the existing Interwoven CMS, perform the necessary Drupal configurations and customizations, address the various integration points, and tune for performance and scalability.

Site Functionality

In many ways, the functionality APQC desired is perfect for Drupal. They needed a platform that would allow them to:

• share and publish content in a variety of forms
• efficiently manage document workflow
• offer community-building features such as blogs, a ratings system, user-created groups, find-a-peer, and forums
• sell content at different prices to different types of users
• handle content access permissions via a robust group management system

 
Although there were significant development challenges associated with developing APQC's enterprise-scale solution, Drupal rose to the occasion.

For large Drupal deployments, performance is key. One way to improve site speed is to unload search functionality onto a dedicated platform, called Solr, that provides better performance and more options. Here are the top five reasons to integrate Solr with your Drupal site:

1. The White House did it!
2. Drupal and Solr have existing integration paths and modules to facilitate integration.
3. Drupal 7 is becoming even more integrated with Solr, especially the new version of Drupal’s popular and robust Views module which enables quick content access and configuration.
4. Solr is free and open source – It’s clean energy!
5. Solr is fast. The Java searching library speeds up search and can be housed on a different server, taking some of the load off your web server.
   

Contact us today to power your Drupal website searching with Solr.

For our client Bella Pictures, we’ve been working on a sweepstakes component that allows site visitors to design and win their dream wedding package. The sweepstakes will provide Bella sales representatives with an excellent source of leads.The leads are captured in Drupal, then packaged and sent to Eloqua, a software product Bella uses to manage marketing campaigns.
 
Bella wanted contest participants to experience the simplicity of shopping on the web site (read more about Bella's Ubercart shopping experience here). Contestants proceed through the shopping cart as if they were customers--selecting photo albums, videographers, and other accessories--but instead of buying the package when clicking submit, they’re entered into the contest.
 
In addition to forwarding the information to Eloqua, a new Drupal user is created for each participant. Why? Most of the entries will not win, and Bella wants the non-winners to purchase a wedding package. If the contestant already has a login from entering the sweepstakes, one of the obstacles to conversion is removed.
 

(This is part 3 of a comparison of Joomla! and Drupal in the enterprise. See parts 1 and 2 of Joomla! and Drupal in the Enterprise.)

Drupal and Joomla! benefit from sizable and energetic communities with high coding standards, and both platforms have clear and well-documented guidelines for extending the functionality of the core software.

Joomla! has guided those who customize and extend the core product to employ the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. MVC is a widely-known object-oriented programming pattern and it provides developers with a framework for separating data access from business logic and data presentation.

Drupal does not employ object-oriented programming in the strict sense. Instead, developers can add their own functionality via a set of hooks that are available via the Drupal API.

This article describes the consequences of these divergent development strategies for those attempting to customize and extend Joomla! and Drupal.

Achieve Internet has been leading Solr development for the Drupal.org redesign for a while, and we were officially named lead Solr developer last week.
 
One general goal for the new site is to efficiently deliver useful and relevant content to the user. Technically, this involves several important tasks:

Continuing the comparison between Joomla! and Drupal in enterprise settings, this article addresses how each technology separates administrative functionality from public-facing content.

 

Drupal vs Joomla!- Content Listing.

In the current versions, Joomla!’s back-end is more distinct from the visitor-facing pages than is Drupal. The Joomla! administrative area is a GUI control panel, with icons and administrative menus guiding content management activities.

In various published comparisons, including CmsWire and and Top Notch Themes, between Joomla! and Drupal, the common conclusion is that Joomla! excels in allowing web developers to quickly produce high-quality and attractive small and medium sized websites while the strength of Drupal is providing a framework for larger customized sites that serve many users.

Some of the comparisons are out of date or lack sufficient technical detail to fully support their conclusions. Furthermore, both Joomla! and the Drupal CMS are on the verge of releasing new versions, Joomla! 1.6 and Drupal 7, that will move both products in a positive direction.

This series of articles attempts to address where the technologies stand now, with a keen eye on the fact that both are moving targets as they approach new releases. The focus will be on using the web design software to build enterprise level websites, including those for large businesses, government agencies, and sizable non-profits, as this is the focus of Achieve Internet, based in San Diego, CA. We will examine the following topics from a technical perspective: baseline content management system (CMS) functionality, back-end appearance and functionality, and coding & customization.

SAN DIEGO, CA -- June 28, 2010 -- Followingthe June 2010 appointment of Susan Rust as Achieve Internet's VP of Client Services, the company is pleased to announce the hiring of well-known, local industry figure Karina R. Lion, as Director of Business Development. Over two decades ago, Lion hinted at her abilities to findwinning firms when she chose Mike Chipman as one of her first clients. His company, ChipSoft Inc., would eventually become Intuit Inc.