Dries Buytaert, 29

DrupalSimple, exible Web publishing

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The Internet has made publishing on aglobal scale almost effortless. Thats therhetoric, anyway. The truth is morecomplicated, because the Internet pro-vides only a means of distribution; awould-be publisher still needs a publish-ing tool. A decade ago, people whowanted such a tool had three choices, allbad: a cheap but inflexible system, aversatile but expensive one, or one writ-ten from scratch. What was needed wassomething in the middle, requiring nei-ther enormous expense nor months ofdevelopmentnot a single application,but a platform for creating custom pub-

lishing environments. For tens of thou-sands of sites and millions of users, thatsomething is Drupal.Created as an open-source project byDries Buytaert, Drupal is a free contentmanagement frameworka tool forbuilding customized websites quicklyand easily, without sacrificing featuresor stability. Site owners can choose froma list of possible features: they might,say, want to publish articles, offer eachuser a profile and a blog, or allow usersto vote or comment on content. Allthese features are optional, and mostare independent of the others.

With Drupals high degree of individual-ization, users can escape cookie-cuttertools without investing in completelycustom-made creations, which can betime-consuming, costly, and hard tomaintain. The Howard Dean presidentialcampaign used Drupal in 2004, andtoday its used by Greenpeace U.K., thehumor magazine the Onion, NikesBeijing Olympics site, and MTV U.K.,among many others.The diversity of its users has led tomany improvements, Buytaert says:The size, passion, and velocity of theDrupal community makes incredible

things happen. There are tens of thou-sands of active Drupal installationsworldwide. Thousands of developershave contributed to the systems core,and more than 2,000 plug-ins have beenadded by outside contributors.Buytaert began the work that becameDrupal in 2000, when he was an under-graduate at the University of Antwerp.He had a news site called Drop.org, andhe needed an internal message board tohost discussions. After reviewing theexisting options for flexible messageboards, Buytaert decided he could writea better version from scratch.

The original version of Drupal (its namederives from the Dutch for droplet)worked well enough to attract addition-al users, who proposed new features.Within a year, Buytaert decided to makethe project open source. He released thecode in January 2001 as version 1.0.Since open-source projects tend toattract expert users, they often lackclear user interfaces and readable docu-mentation, making them unfriendly tomere mortals. But Buytaert understoodfrom the beginning how importantusability is to the cycle of improvement,adoption, and more improvement that

drives the development of open-sourcesoftware. The core Drupal installationcomes with voluminous help files. Thecentral team regularly polls users as wellas developers (which is unusual in anopen-source project) to decide what toimprove next. The process reveals notjust features to add, but ones toremove, and ways to make existing fea-tures easier to understand. For example,the projects website has beenredesigned to help people new to Drupalfigure out how to get up and running.Buytaert has also founded a company,Acquia, to offer support, service, and

custom development for Drupal users,especially businesses. He calls Acquiamy other full-time job and likens it toLinux distributor Red Hat, which pro-vides custom packaging and support forits version of the open-source operatingsystem. With Drupal version 7, due later thisyear, Buytaert hopes to include tech-nologies that will make sites runningDrupal part of the Semantic Web, TimBerners-Lees vision for making onlinedata understandable to machines aswell as people. If Drupal hosts a websitecontaining a companys Securities and

Exchange Commission profile, for exam-ple, other sites could access just thethird-quarter revenues, without havingto retrieve the whole profile. The goal ofsharing data in smaller, better-definedchunks is to make Drupal a key part ofthe growing eco-system of websites thatshare structured data. If this effort suc-ceeds, it will ensure Drupals continuedrelevance to the still-developing Web. Clay Shirky

Dropping InDrupal founder Dries Buytaert discusses how his vision and the open-source nature of the project benet the content-management system.

Video by AMPS/MIT Libraries

Dries Buytaert, 293T R 5

Drop by DropThe Drupal website makes it easy fornew users to get started with the contentmanagement system.

Once installed, the software walks usersthrough creating and customizing awebsite, step by step.

Tens of thousands of websites that useDrupal rely on it to organize and managetheir content and provide customizedfeatures, from nonprofits such asGreenpeace UK...

...to popular media sites such as theOnion...

...to large commercial sites such asNikes Beijing Olympics site.

Drupal founder and project managerDries Buytaert recently started a companycalled Acquia, which will provide a com-mercially supported version of Drupal.