[consulting] CMS comparison

[John Sechrest]

Boris Mann <boris at bryght.com> writes:

 % I'm still confused about these types of issues. There are techniques  
 % to make things relatively painless. Obviously, maintaining Drupal  
 % installations on multiple different client sites is difficult. SVN is  
 % your friend...in many ways, every independent consultant should be  
 % maintaining their own centralized "distro" of Drupal with patches  
 % etc. applied as they like.

 Yes... What I just heard you say is that if you want stability,
 you need to keep your own branch of drupal and you have to 
 become a developer who straddles the gap between where
 drupal wanders off to and where your distro is. 

 Isn't one of the main rules of computer science that you want to
 only define things in one place.... And so you have to keep
 divergence between what you are doing and what drupal is doing...
 breaking this rule. 



 % If I were an independent consultant, I would have hosting that I  
 % would bundle, and turn down $5/month on Random J Web Host. Well,  
 % either that, or charge for my time to keep things up in many  
 % different environments.

 IE, you would go get a dedicated managed server(s) somewhere
 and sell drupal services off of that. 



 % >  If the decided goal of drupal is to be a platform for invention,
 % >  then that is a different goal than having a stable platform that
 % >  organizations like city governments and businesses need for
 % >  the stable support of their tasks.

 % Well, the current version needs to work. At future points, when the  
 % requirements for a particular site/deployment change, then making a  
 % decision on whether or not to upgrade should be guided by the  
 % consultant.


 But you know that you always get into the delimna of compatability
 with old structures and training  versus the neat new feature that 
 is only available in version 4.X++ . Having old modules that did a 
 fine job evaporate over an upgrade is just plain painful. 


 % >  Why would an organization like a city government, which is aiming
 % >  at consistancy and quality want to engage in using drupal if
 % >  the tool goal is to be a platform for invention?

 % Because you can get additional development and advancements for a  
 % much lower cost than proprietary systems, you're not locked into one  
 % consulting firm or company because it's all open.

 But.... Joomla and the 80 other LAMP based non-proprietary systems
 that are on cmsmatrix.com and opensourcecms.org are part of the 
 consideration. And in fact, our local government ended up with
 Mambo after the evaluation. Because of all the reasons listed before
 in this thread. (the out of the box experience and themes were
 cool enough and the forum and galleries worked well enough)

 
 So what you list above is not a reason for drupal alone. 
 And for a consultant in the LAMP tool space, what makes it cost
 effective to our clients to have them use drupal instead of $XYZLAMP. 
 
 If you are an organization that wants to experiment with new
 features that are in motion... Drupal clearly wins...

 But many organizations are looking for stability, ease of use
 and clarity. 

 What is the pathway to create a package/module/distro that
 has drupal on the inside but has an out of the box experience
 that makes it easy for the audience to get engaged?

 In my mind... the pathway involves some kind of API
 that draws a line between what will change and what won't change.

 And given the discussions on the development list, I don't
 have a sense that drupal as a whole is ready to define an API. 


  

 


-----
John Sechrest          .         Helping people use
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                          .            more effectively
                             .                      
                                 .       Internet: sechrest at peak.org
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                                              . http://www.peak.org/~sechrest