CMS

You may have heard the buzz about ways to make building certain kinds of Drupal sites easier. The terms "installation profile," "distribution," and "feature module" get thrown around a lot. But what do these terms really mean, and why do they matter?

Drupal Commons (DC) is a Drupal distribution billed as “social business software.” That means that Acquia is distributing Drupal bundled with some other modules preconfigured to work as a company’s interactive user-facing website. The most recent DC update 1.0 was released on August 5th.

DrivenByYou.com represents a new approach to buying cars online. Traditional online car buying guides users to shop for automobiles by selecting a make, model or year as the first step of the buying process. Autotrader.com decided to take lessons learned from shoppers at brick-and-mortar auto dealerships and apply them to an online car buying experience.

Mediacurrent and Phase2 Technology are proud to co-release and announce the availability of a white paper titled Building Large-Scale Publishing Sites with Drupal. First and foremost, this was truly a collaborative effort between two Drupal-centric firms who share a common interest in building world-class Drupal sites for the publishing industry.

We had an action packed Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) meetup last week with two awesome demonstrations of emerging Drupal distributions - Open Publish, which was created by our friends at Phase2 Technology and Drupal Gardens from our partner, Acquia.

Administering a Drupal 6 website can be a bit challenging for website owners that are new to Drupal. J. Ayen Green's book Drupal 6 Content Administration (ISBN 978-1-847198-56-3) offers newbies a quick-start guide for getting up to speed on Drupal.

One of the over-riding goals of the Drupalcamp Atlanta organizers was to provide as much video footage of the event as possible in order to share back to the community at large. We also heard from a lot of people that had a conflict of interest with the date, were turned away by the weather, or may have attended, and wanted to see two or more sessions that overlapped.

UPDATE April 28, 2013:
Read my latest review on Sharepoint 2013, "Comparing the Social Business Platforms: Part 2 - Sharepoint."

Last weekend was the first ever Drupalcamp Atlanta, and I am proud to report that things went really well. As I write this, we've had 11 straight days of downpours in metro Atlanta and flooding throughout the city. As a result, we had a higher percentage of no-shows than we would have liked, but about 200 Drupal'ers braved the weather and made it out.