Drop in on Drupal

Drupal 4.7.4 is a Moodle-like open-source Content Management System that has its origins in an ADSL-sharing scheme originally set up by University of Antwerp students Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder in 2000. According to the official website “The name Drupal, pronounced ‘droo-puhl’, is derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word ‘druppel’ which stands for ‘drop'”.

Obviously, being open-source, the basic CMS is free to download. It requires a PHP-capable web server (such as Apache 2.0) running PHP version 4.3.3+, and a PHP-supported Database Server such as MySQL v3.23.17 or newer. All of the system requirements can be viewed here.

I’ll post a comprehemsive review of Drupal once I’ve had a closer look. In the meantime, check out the links for yourself.

A new day, a new way

Here  we are at the threshhold of a new era, and the gutenburg press is still warm… It’s an exciting time to be alive, and I’m really appreciating the opportunity to disseminate cliches to a wider audience. (I find it’s best to get this sort of stuff out of the way early on, so we can get on with the real business of talking tech in a meaningful way).

Openserving: a new look at social software

Openserving is about to be released by the Wikipedia developers. It’s a free open-source hosting service that offers web-space for “collaborative blogging” and more.

What’s different about it? Well, for starters, all articles are “sorted democratically”. In practice this means that each article put up by site-owners or reader-contributors can be voted on. Articles with the highest votes are automatically moved to the front page of the site.

Another left-field innovation is that site owners get to keep 100% of the revenue generated by ads placed on the site. Feeds from other sources can also be added and edited by the site owner.

This all sounds too altruistic to be true. The people at Wikia Inc. who are making all of this possible have set themselves up for some failry major costs, you’d have to think. And philanthropy has its limits – even when you’re at the major-shareholder-in-Microsoft level.

At the moment I’m willing to keep an open mind on this, at least until it’s actually online. Wikia is taking registrations at this point, so if it sounds interesting, have a look at http://www.openserving.com/