PlainsFM Show Two - 2010: So you want a web site - Part IV

This is an interview between Edward Swift (PlainsFM 96.9) and Dave Lane (Egressive) discussing what you need to consider when creating a website - part IV.

Previous parts: I, II, and III.

Before the holidays, we had a series of three interviews with Dave Lane from Egressive talking about "What you need to consider when creating a website". We looked at defining the basics of websites, what makes them up, and then we learned about the difference between static and dynamic websites. We learned that nowadays, because of the rise of outstanding community developed open source dynamic web platforms: blog engines and full Content Management Systems like Wordpress, Joomla, Plone, and Drupal, among others that the world has moved on from static websites. Dave, at the end of the last interview in this series you were telling us about the poor companies you deal with who had the misfortune, previously, to commit themselves to totally customised proprietary Content Management Systems - the sort that every web company was writing in the late nineties - only to find themselves paying a lot, getting very little, and feeling totally locked in and helpless. They couldn't escape their decision without losing their entire investment! Is there any way to avoid that?

In my experience, the most important qualities that a CMS can have are

• A sufficiently flexible design for your requirements - for instance, Wordpress is a "blog" engine. If you want a blog, it's excellent. If you're wanting to build a website for a university that allows staff and students all to have their own blogs, however, then it's not a good option.
• A strong, diverse community - different CMSs attract different kinds of developer and designer communities. Some have a lot of designers, but not many developers, so the sites look great but don't work very reliably or don't get timely fixes for security problems. Other communities appeal more to developers and the CMS's code is a thing of beauty, but it's too hard for most people to understand, so it tends to look pretty rough even though it works very well.

At Egressive, back in 2004, we did significant research when choosing a CMS to build our web development business around. We focused on criteria like

• design for extensibility - like how easy it is to customise and add functionality created by the community
• design for maintainability - things like security fixes and ease of upgrading existing sites to newer versions of the CMS
• design for performance - is it easy to scale from a tiny mum-and-pop site to something the size of TradeMe or even Facebook?
• design for longevity - is the community vibrant and sustainable.

In the end, we had a short list of 12 CMSs, and we compared them on 150 criteria, weighted based on their importance to us. The winner was Drupal and the runner up was Joomla. We especially liked what we saw in Drupal - the technically elegant core and modular structure, the focus within the community on web standards compliance, and the huge enthusiasm, generosity and broad skill range of the developer community - it just felt like a health ecosystem.

And now, 6 years later, are you happy with your decision?

We went with Drupal as a CMS and we haven't regretted - its technology and its community seem to go from strength to strength. It feels like the whole thing is thriving. A couple weekends ago, my colleagues and I were lucky enough to attend the second DrupalSouth Drupal developer conference in Wellington. The 100 spots sold out well before the event, and we had the privilege of meeting several Drupal community luminaries who were in NZ thanks to Linux.conf.au, held the week before. One of those inspiring Drupal exponents was Angela Byron (who goes by the handle "webchick" on the community's main portal, Drupal.org) who is one of the coordinators of the Drupal core development, the heart of the Drupal. She did a demo of a pre-release of the upcoming Drupal 7, the latest major version of the CMS framework, and the audience was absolutely blown away. Some of us have played with the pre-release version, as it's developed completely out in the open for anyone to see and participate, but looking at it through her eyes, with her insight on the direction things were taking made all of us watching realise how remarkable this developer community really is, and how much talent and energy we have among us - more than any commercial company - even Microsoft - could realistically muster. So, to answer you question, Ed, yes, we're happy with our decision. If our very heavy workload is anything to go by, businesses, NGOs and government agencies out there are every bit as enthusiastic!