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The Drupal Conference, Barcelona 2007

By William Eaton

From the 19th-22nd of September, Stacy Prendeville, William Eaton, and Matthew Wittering of the Andalucia Web Solutions’ Operations team attended the Barcelona Drupal Conference.

Drupal is a software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Due to its open-source nature, it allows hundreds and thousands of advanced users of the system to create their own modules for new and clever functions which can then be shared with everyone else. Andalucia Web Solutions are continually looking to improve the performance and functionality of Andalucia.com by managing the site via an advanced Content Management System.

A Content Management System (CMS) is really useful on sites where the content needs to be changed often or where there is a huge amount of content which can be interrelated. Content Management Systems are also used in circumstances where an editor needs to update content quite often but has no HTML knowledge. The glory of a CMS is that all the information on a page is dynamic and so you can do many exciting things such as:

• Dynamically relating content (dynamic links to similar pages based on descriptions);
• Dynamic images – The system will find images that have something to do with the content (based on content and image tags), thereby making it possible to show different images each time;
• User driven content – users can comment and add their own thoughts on the information about Andalucia like users do with sites like Wikipedia;
• If there are any forum topics that relate to the content of a page then it will appear as a link;
• It can show dynamically driven content on the home page which informs the visitor about the current “hot topics” and the most popular pages at that time, as well as showing information that a visitor is specifically interested in (for registered users).

Andalucia.com is in the process of implementing an advanced CMS, we have been carefully considering many options for a long time, but the biggest problem has been the size of the website.  Andalucia.com is quickly approaching the 6000 page mark which means it really is a mammoth task to try and extract all of the information that has been written.  Therefore, it is understandable that we have had to be very careful in finding and choosing the right system for the task, which we believe is Drupal.

There are many Content Management Systems readily available which are free to use under the General Public License (GPL) as well as many companies who are offering “bespoke systems”. It was decided that by choosing a public CMS with a great community like Drupal, much of our required functionality would be already available to install. Also, it may be possible to implement innovative cutting edge functionality as and when the Internet evolves.

Drupal describes itself as being “Equipped with a powerful blend of features which can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites” ...with a bold statement like that, we hope to put them to one of the biggest tests!