Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By now you may have heard of Ourmedia.org, a project that connects a Drupal-powered front end with the unlimited storage and bandwidth of the Internet Archive. It went live, with some hickups, a little over a week ago, and now has over 9,000 users registered. Marc Canter and JD Lasica are the project founders, and continue to drive it forward.
People new to Drupal have started asking about the codebase associated with Ourmedia, so I'm writing up this short post mainly for them. Bryght helped developed portions of Ourmedia, most notably the glue code to the Internet Archive, funded by Marc Canter's Broadband Mechanics company. James Walker worked with Parker Thompson of the Internet Archive to get this code up and running. That will be made available, although developers will need to make their own arrangements with the Internet Archive.
NowPublic.com is a Drupal powered site focused on changing the way the news becomes news. Imagine that you are walking down the streets of Manhattan when a trailer drives by with the group U2 jamming away. You use your camera phone to snap a wicked shot of Bono - but where do you send it? To your blog? To your friends? To a bulletin board? But how is anyone who doesn't know you going to find it? Instead, you could email it to news@nowpublic.com and let the world know that there's something cool going on. NowPublic lets you share your good stuff with not only your friends but with the world, while at the same time protecting your rights and giving you full credit. Here's an example of what I mean:
The presentations at the Drupal conference on February 26th are available now as audio and video files. The video files are encoded with the multimedia codec Ogg Theora. The files are distributed via BitTorrent. If you need more help, check the instructions on how to download and play Ogg Theora files on various operating systems.
Using Alexa, a traffic ranking service from Amazon, I compared drupal.org's traffic with the traffic of other Free and Open Source content management systems' websites. The term content management system is used broadly here as the list of projects include phpBB, Plone, TikiWiki, Wordpress, Xoops, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Typo3, Xaraya and Drupal friend CivicSpace.
Popularity is compared based on Alexa's daily reach-metric, which measures the number of users. Here, foo.com and www.foo.com are treated as the same site because they reside on the same domain. The results are presented in pretty graphs (generated by Alexa) and included below. Of course, the results must be taken with a grain of salt as the popularity of a product's website is not necessarily related to the popularity of the product itself, or the quality thereof. So whenever I write popularity that really means the popularity of the website as measured by Alexa. Regardless, a number of interesting observations can be made ...
I've played with Drupal for a few days now, and while I don't have a public site up yet, I'm starting to get my bearings. So I thought I'd write a little bit about my initial Drupal experience while it's still fresh in my head.