NYCPHP Meetup

[Joomla Training]

Mitch is dead on by saying its not as simple as J vs D.

Seems like this was the culmination of years of work by Drupal people in DC,
targeting and learning how to get government contracts. O'Reilly has a blog
post on how big these guys are thinking and how professionally they're doing
business:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html

" ... don't underestimate the difficulty of doing business in Washington.
Procurement is done through a complex ballet understood by few open source
companies ... a big IT deployment like this requires coordination between
many companies, each providing a piece of the puzzle. According to
techpresident.com, no fewer than five firms were involved in the switch:
prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists
Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai."

FWIW, he agrees with Mitch's point about the social features:

"Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide
functionality the White House can use to expand its social media
capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to
multi-lingual support."

Drupal folk did http://recovery.gov and http://www.nysenate.gov plus
http://commerce.gov apparently is coming next:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/bringing-drupal-us-government

The flip side is that Drupal has no commercial market to speak of - all the
money is in custom work.

Steve



On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Mitch Pirtle <mitch.pirtle at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Gary Mort <garyamort at gmail.com> wrote:
> > While this is a bit of sour grapes, and I am overall thrilled to see a
> high
> > profile website[the White House] switiching to an Open Source
> CMS[Drupal],
> > it does make me think a bit about just what is it with about Drupal that
> > makes it penetrate a bit further at the government level.
> >
> >
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/whitehouse_website_goes_open_source/
> >
> > By the same token, the local county spent the past 6 months building out
> > their tourism associated website.  In the end, the functionality leaves
> me
> > underwhelmed:
> > http://www.ulstercountyalive.com/
> >
> > For example, the lodging directory is fairly basic functionality - and no
> > rss feeds.
> >
> > I have found Drupal to have a stronger community of tech geeks using it,
> but
> > a weaker community of functional users.  A lot of components for Drupal
> tend
> > to be "proof of concept' type's, where I can see how they could be
> extended
> > to something functional, but their not quite there.
> >
> > Joomla, by contrast, has a lot of apps which from a technical perspective
> > are exactly the same but by changing labels and gearing, they are fully
> > functional drop in apps to do something.
> >
> > So why is Drupal making inroads while Joomla seems to be lagging?  Any
> > thoughts?
>
> A note of research: Is there an advisory board for open source
> technologies to the government, and if so who is participating there?
> This is pretty much the case behind the White House website, AFAICT.
>
> That said, this is a good time to compare the state of Joomla versus
> the state of Drupal.
>
> First off, I think Dries' blog post about the White House website
> using Drupal is an absolute case study in how to perfectly word a
> major success.  His tone, writing style, and message are all dead on
> the money. Perfectly written.
>
> Drupal is very aggressively growing their community as an area of
> focus, and as such is generating tremendous buzz which in turn feeds
> their efforts. As well, their approach with the 3PD market is totally
> opposite what Joomla inherited from Mambo (albeit some major changes
> these past years). Combine the two and comparatively there's not a
> whole lot of outreach from the Joomla project, nor aggressive
> encouragement or enabling of the community for advocacy.
>
> Lastly, having a well-funded, well-connected business like Acquia is
> high risk, high reward for Drupal, as they can focus all of their
> efforts through one organization, making it easier to target events
> and get the most out of their available resources. Joomla's commercial
> developer community is distributed over many small, non-funded
> businesses that simply don't have the media or executive clout; and
> lack incentive to band together to be one larger resource to the
> project (and community).
>
> In Joomla's defense, the project is a clear market leader and probably
> does not see all that outreach work as priority; and it's clear from
> the outside perspective that they are actively looking for more
> volunteers to help with the project itself, and need those resources
> for other things than outreach and PR. Different problems, I'd say.
>
> * Drupal - focus is gaining market share, has tons of developers
> * Joomla - owns the market, focus is looking for more developers
> (needs reorganization)
>
> That also means Joomla will not be a "hot topic" while it is in a
> somewhat low-key phase, working on all these relatively internal
> issues.
>
> One totally random point that is key: Drupal comes out of the box with
> loads of social features, and Joomla has NONE by default. With
> everyone scrambling to be the next big social media hype magnet, first
> impressions will always lead them to the platform that has all the hip
> and trendy features out of the box, and that ain't Joomla.
>
> That said, my personal take is that Joomla needs to provide some of
> these features at a bare minimum, and I do believe some of them are
> targeted for 1.6 at least. Chances are, as the base Joomla
> distribution closes that social feature gap with Drupal, this
> perception will change.
>
> -- Mitch
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