IBM
IBM on hosting Drupal sites
Just when we are talking about mass Drupal hosting, IBM comes up with a technical article on hosting and deploying Drupal sites. Coincidence?
This is the twelfth article in IBM's series entitled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative website that focuses exclusively on Drupal. If you are an aspiring Drupal developer, these articles are a must read.
IBM adds DB2 support to Drupal
IBM's Internet Technology Group posted the ninth article in their series entitled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative website. In this article, IBM explains Drupal's database layer, shows module developers how to write portable database code and explains how to install and maintain a module's database schema from one version to another. Last but not least, they show how to add support for their IBM DB2 Express-C database. Sweet!
(Idea: if you are a publisher, get in touch with IBM, and see if you can work with them to make a Drupal book out of their Drupal articles?)
IBM builds a Drupal module
IBM's Internet Technology Group posted the sixth article in their series entitled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative website. In this article, IBM shows you how to create a very simple Drupal module to provide announcements on a website.
As mentioned in the Drupal forums: "IBM's articles have been a great help; technically speaking as well as to help me 'sell' Drupal to my bosses. IBM backing still goes a long way."
IBM focuses on Drupal
IBM developerWorks has started a new series entitled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative website.
In the series, IBM's Internet Technology Group team describes a fictitious organization that requires a website that includes document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, etc. Because no turnkey solution is available they are faced with the task to extend and customize one of the available Open Source content management systems. After reviewing numerous Open Source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type and Wordpress, IBM decided to use Drupal to illustrate the creation of this website:
Drupal is a relative youngster compared to other content management systems. However, we got the impression the framework was well written, robust, very extensible, and seemed to have a thriving development community that was generating a lot of adoption and support ...
We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal.
What makes this series invaluable is that the articles are written around the basic premise that customization is a necessity. It reinforces that, if we want to create the best content management system in the world, we should focus on making Drupal (i) easier to use, (ii) easier to develop for, and (iii) easier to theme.