Drupal gaining acceptance in the enterprise

It's a great time to be an open source developer. At least, that was the mood Thursday morning at DrupalCon in Washington, D.C. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert told a crowd of over 1,000 developers and fans that Drupal's growth is strong and will continue to be strong throughout 2009. According to Buytaert, Drupal was downloaded 200,000 times last month alone, a 100 percent increase over last year.

Drupal is the PHP-based CMS that powers several high-profile public sites like President Obama's Recovery.gov and Mother Jones (not to mention FierceContentManagement), as well as internal departmental sites within major corporations like Biogen Idec.

As FierceContentManagement reported in November, open-source solutions are an attractive option for organizations looking to cut costs by eliminating CMS license fees. "The economic downturn will be good for most open source companies," says Jay Batson, co-founder of Drupal professional services firm Acquia. In addition to the cost savings in switching to Drupal, Batson says the availability of professional support contracts allows open-source platforms to gain a foothold in large organizations with strict IT policies. "People are learning more about open source, and they are becoming more comfortable with its licensing issues and processes," he adds.

Since Drupal development is led by the community it is subject to vague release dates and disagreements over the direction of the platform--issues common to many large, open-source projects. That said, Drupal's large ecosystem of developers is perhaps its greatest strength. Drupal.org is home to over 4,400 free add-ins, called modules, that add functionality to the platform. Nearly every common CMS feature can be added to Drupal through a module, though not all modules are as robust and well tested as features built in to Drupal core.

Drupal 7, currently in development, is expected to add several new features of interest to enterprise customers, including better file and document management and compatibility with a wider range of backend databases beyond the default MySQL. Developers can also submit new features for inclusion in Drupal 7 until September. According to Buytaert, the final version of Drupal 7 will be released to the public "when it's ready."

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