Submitted by Chris Johnson (not verified) on Mon, 02/11/2008 - 09:54.
I suspect the CMS name still has a little gas left in it. But I also feel it is inaccurate to almost the same extent that calling Drupal “social publishing software” is. That latter name implies Drupal is not good at building non-social web applications, or not good at building non-publishing web applications. Yet it is.
As I’ve been saying since at least February, 2006 — when I got up and talked about it in an “Enterprise” session at DrupalCon Vancouver — Drupal is a web application development platform in which a powerful CMS is one built-in implementation.[1] Drupal’s basic core, although slanted towards CMS operations support, really has all the key elements to enable the construction of just about any web application.
As someone who wrote a bunch of web applications from scratch, I really appreciate that Drupal handles the database abstraction for me, handles the prevention of things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks and other sorts of security risks — all using best practices and thoroughly evaluated by dozens, maybe hundreds, of very smart developers. Other parts of the framework are getting there, too. Drupal 6 and internationalization and localization, is an example. Drupal really provides a very powerful toolkit for building far more kinds of things than fit into the CMS or social publishing monikers.
I think if we (the Drupal development communnity) don’t falter, Drupal will become a dominant player. PHP has its detractors, as does MySQL, two technologies Drupal is quite dependent upon now. But if we can solve the most pressing dozen problems without injuring one group of developers by making their lives more difficult (i.e. Drupal becomes less useful than changing technologies to something else, e.g. Ruby on Rails), there is a good future ahead.
I suspect the CMS name still has a little gas left in it. But I also feel it is inaccurate to almost the same extent that calling Drupal “social publishing software” is. That latter name implies Drupal is not good at building non-social web applications, or not good at building non-publishing web applications. Yet it is.
As I’ve been saying since at least February, 2006 — when I got up and talked about it in an “Enterprise” session at DrupalCon Vancouver — Drupal is a web application development platform in which a powerful CMS is one built-in implementation.[1] Drupal’s basic core, although slanted towards CMS operations support, really has all the key elements to enable the construction of just about any web application.
As someone who wrote a bunch of web applications from scratch, I really appreciate that Drupal handles the database abstraction for me, handles the prevention of things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting attacks and other sorts of security risks — all using best practices and thoroughly evaluated by dozens, maybe hundreds, of very smart developers. Other parts of the framework are getting there, too. Drupal 6 and internationalization and localization, is an example. Drupal really provides a very powerful toolkit for building far more kinds of things than fit into the CMS or social publishing monikers.
I think if we (the Drupal development communnity) don’t falter, Drupal will become a dominant player. PHP has its detractors, as does MySQL, two technologies Drupal is quite dependent upon now. But if we can solve the most pressing dozen problems without injuring one group of developers by making their lives more difficult (i.e. Drupal becomes less useful than changing technologies to something else, e.g. Ruby on Rails), there is a good future ahead.
[1] Thanks to Nedjo and/or others for the more succinct wording.