[consulting] CMS comparison

[Jenny Hsueh]

I love this thread!

So what is Drupal, who is it for?  I think there are two view points  it 
needs to address:  the technology architecture and the business 
architecture.

- from technology point of view, I like drupal to be a developers or 
integrators framework. The drupal core should be simple and elegant. I 
like drupal core developers to focus more on the architecture 
consistencies and using a development approach that is easier for other  
to follow. Such as using the OMG MDA approach that we start out with 
some UML modeling before the  code implementation. This can also help to 
abstract the functionalities into many different abstraction layers if 
required,  so that we can easily replace one implementations over the 
others, or easier to see the combination of modules that is required for 
a given business solution.

- from business point of view.  I like the profile approach so we can 
market drupal to many different audience. This can also off load the 
debates of is it a blogging tool or a group collaboration tool.  With 
this approach, different communities with different interests will 
naturally cluster together to address their specific needs.  We need to 
formalize the profile definition process, is it one set of modules 
pre-defined or is it a tool/framework to allow me to define my own 
profiles etc. 

We do need a vision for things as I described above, without a vision we 
are all blind.

To me, Drupal is not your grandma's CMS, it is going to serve a market I 
feel it is not yet formed or is in its infancy.  a lot of our work is 
inspired from here  http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_8/jordan/  
and here: http://www.vive-ig.net/projects/alive/index.html

On a different note, I love to test out the mailing functions but gimme 
a profile that is like groups.drupal.org so that I have something to 
work from without the needs of figuring out all the configurations.  If 
we have a target to shoot for the testing is usually easier.

Jenny