Today is the day we have been waiting for and the reason that we all made the trip to Belgium, Drupal CMS. We are looking forward to learning and sharing our experience with this content management system. Here are is some preliminary information.

The Hiveminds Team is responsible for the conversion of about 15 plus websites to Drupal. So far in the last year we have converted two very large and important webites abandonia.com and student.be.

Gabor Hojtsy talks about Drupal 6

abandonia.com
student.be
skoore.com
studentis.com

Scheduled for converison:

mvgplus.com
spana.com
shoutcentral.com
pajas.com
pupkus.com
reloaded.com

The site we have built and are running on Drupal 4.7 and will be for the near future. Once all websites are upgraded to 4.7 then we will start the process of upgrading once more to the latest stable version of Drupal, hopefully Drupal 6.

Dries talks about Drupal 6 and the future of Drupal

Dries speaks about the Drupal of the future. To be honest everything that he mentions is already present in Typo3. There might be problems with this as Typo3 is suffering from being stale because there it is no longer a quick start CMS it lost this tag when it became so complicated that only dedicated programmers and businesses wanted to use it. One of Drupal's strengths is that it can still be used by the hobbyist. If it loses this then it will become just another ezPublish or Typo3 only without the benefits of OOP to save it from complete obscurity. Drupal may also come direct competition to these other CMS's and lose in the enterprise fight because of known stability and longevity of those other CMS. The concentration on data is a good thing but only if it comes in the form a solid and usable framework. The framework would also have to be autonomous from the the Drupal version. There should be a core engine and a CMS built on top of it. This is something that is very obvious in Expression Engine and Code Igniter.

Happy Publishing!

With ten years of experience in web development he spends most of his work day developing in PHP,mySQL and Drupal
Carl McDade - Systems Developer