Submitted by Jeff Whatcott on Thu, 02/14/2008 - 07:36.
Good stuff. It is indeed clear that Drupal is in the process of becoming a more generalized web application framework. The thread you mentioned has some very good thinking in it that will no doubt yield excellent progress in this direction in the Drupal 7 cycle.
I guess the challenge is where to position Drupal today vs the future. It’s partly about the technology: what Drupal is actually capable of, but it is equally about about generally held perceptions. It’s usually a bad idea to overreach - people have a hard time buying into a claim that something has leapt into a totally differnt category. But they have less trouble believing that there has been a shift into an adjacent category.
I would argue that in the past Drupal was positioned as a CMS and that positioning has stuck. My perception is that in the future it will become a full blown web application framework but much work remains to a) make that fully true and b) to get people to recognize it as such.
So my approach is to point to an adjacent category: social media software, and use examples like Fast Company to illustrate that right now, Drupal is way more than a CMS, but not just social media software. And that’s where the concept of “social publishing” comes from. It’s a blending of both.
Good stuff. It is indeed clear that Drupal is in the process of becoming a more generalized web application framework. The thread you mentioned has some very good thinking in it that will no doubt yield excellent progress in this direction in the Drupal 7 cycle.
I guess the challenge is where to position Drupal today vs the future. It’s partly about the technology: what Drupal is actually capable of, but it is equally about about generally held perceptions. It’s usually a bad idea to overreach - people have a hard time buying into a claim that something has leapt into a totally differnt category. But they have less trouble believing that there has been a shift into an adjacent category.
I would argue that in the past Drupal was positioned as a CMS and that positioning has stuck. My perception is that in the future it will become a full blown web application framework but much work remains to a) make that fully true and b) to get people to recognize it as such.
So my approach is to point to an adjacent category: social media software, and use examples like Fast Company to illustrate that right now, Drupal is way more than a CMS, but not just social media software. And that’s where the concept of “social publishing” comes from. It’s a blending of both.