The Zero Room

If you are planning a non-trivial website, this twenty-five minute presentation by Paul Albert, Digital Services Librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library which compares Drupal, a free Web Content Management System and Application Framework, to FatWire, a proprietary Web CMS, should be required viewing.

Many of the arguments presented here in favour of Drupal also apply to any of a number of popular free systems, and most of the arguments against FatWire apply to any proprietary system. In this case the systems were evaluated for their suitability for use by a Medical Academic Library, but any situation where management of a great deal of information via the Web is required might be considered broadly comparable. The staff at Weill Cornell Medical Library found that:

• Drupal is and will be cheaper
• Drupal is robust, extensible, and enterprise ready
• Other departments in their college are already using Drupal, as are other colleges and libraries, and many are dropping equivalent proprietary systems
• Drupal supports "perpetual beta" (continuous improvement of a site)
• Drupal has a much more active support and development community, and "a culture of sharing solutions"
• Drupal has been paired with other technology in proven ways
• Drupal has a gentle learning curve (compared to other development environments)

The Case for Drupal-- Why the Open Source CMS is Well-Suited for a Medical Academic Library from Paul Albert on Vimeo.

Haven't blogged here for a while, so I thought I should mention for the record that I think this is a development of world-shaking importance, in order to in future gloat about how precient I am.

Earl Miles (aka. merlinofchaos on drupal.org), posted this demonstration of some JavaScript magic intended for the Drupal panels module.

We make a point of providing our customers with the tools to easily update their own websites, and encourage them to do so on a regular basis.  Web developers' magazine "A List Apart" has an article titled "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web", which is a goldmine of useful advice for anyone who publishes online.

The guys from Bryght made some videos of presentations at Drupal Camp 2006. There goes my weekend.

Jeremy Keith has a nice article up on A List Apart called "Behavioural Separation". Sounds like a psychiatric disorder, but he's actually talking about separating structure, presentation, and behaviour in web pages. He has some tips on using CSS effeciently, and more importantly on applying JavaScript event handlers to elements via the DOM after the page has loaded, rather than by embedding them in your document markup. Really cool stuff.

Via a talk by Cameron Adams, I came across a new semi-serious buzzword that actually deserves to spread: Hijax.

Coined by Jeremy Keith, Hijax uses a technique called progressive enhancement thus:

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier astutely declares that "We need a shared blog format".  I couldn't agree more. In fact, I think his argument generalises to cover any conceivable category of software, although the problem is particularly acute in the area of web applications.

It is wonderful to be able to use, copy, modify, and redistribute free software. But having the freedom to do what you want with your data is just as important, and that requires open standards for data exchange between applications. Before selecting an application for a particular task, it is prudent to ask "What are my options if, years from now, I find another application that does much the same job, only better?"  Unfortunately, in the case of existing Web Content Management Systems, the only answer is "You will have to do a lot of manual copying and pasting," which simply isn't good enough. A good deal of tedious standards work in this area is long overdue.