yelvington.com

After months of testing, Drupal 6 was officially released today, and I've already upgraded. There are a number of improvements and enhancements that will be of interest to news sites.

One of them is core support for user-configurable workflow through an interesting system of triggers and actions. For example, I quickly created a set that sends me an email any time anyone posts a comment on my website so that I can review it.

I previously had a special-purpose module that did that. With the new core support for triggers and actions, I can easily create my own sets that meet unforeseen needs by just filling out a couple of forms and pressing "enter." For example, I might choose to promote an item to the top of a page if it's getting comments, or change the publication status at a particular time, or block a bot that might succumb to a "honeypot" form.

Setup is radically improved, especially if you're installing from scratch, which is a breeze. If you're upgrading an existing system that has been heavily modified -- which generally is the case for large news sites -- there can be "gotchas," as there are major changes in some of the Drupal internals.

Theme development (page templating) is greatly improved, especially with the devel module, which is a separate module. It demystifies some obscure points of Drupal theming, much as Firebug does for HTML developers.

Other improvements affect large-scale site performance, usability, Ajax enhancements, permissions and scripted events.

All in, it's a greatly strengthened foundation and I know a lot of our tech guys are chomping at the bit to start migrating sites to the new platform. However, some critically important modules such as Views are still in a state of flux, so don't expect to see large-scale sites launching or migrating overnight.

As usual, the core developers are already hard at work on the next big version.

In an awesomely detailed post, the editor of Schamper, the student newspaper at the University of Gent (Belgium) describes how he -- a philosophy major -- built a Web-centric content management system that outputs to Adobe InDesign for print, all based on the open-source Drupal CMS framework. How integrated is it? Well, when an editor opens a story, it's locked so others can't modify it. When it's stored, the XML output is updated and InDesign refreshes the layout. And oh, by the way, there's also a public-facing website. Great work, all integrated by someone who's not a professional programmer, and based on free code.

Drupal is disruptive innovation in action. Many people mistakenly think it's a blogging platform. It began as a communications tool for Belgian student Dries Buytaert to communicate with his dormitory buddies. It's built on open-source foundations (PHP, MySQL or Postgres). Over the last several years it's grown into a powerful, flexible and reliable tool for some pretty high-end projects. I believe Bluffton Today was the first newspaper to use it for the core of its site; now quite a few dailies up to the Virginian-Pilot are using it to power their websites. Now it's moving into print production.