How does Warner Bros. Records work with Drupal?
Warner Bros. Records uses Drupal as the basis for our entire Artist Service Platform (called internally The Platform). The Platform encompasses the artist website, a middleware system we call Digital Detail and a few other associated systems for things like store-fronts and widget content management systems. At the core of everything we do online as a record label is Drupal.
How did you first start working with Drupal?
I started using Drupal in graduate school as a way of making collaborative websites for the classes I was teaching. When I started at Warners in 2005, we looked at a lot of different application frameworks and content management systems including Drupal, Joomla/Mambo, Ruby on Rails and others before deciding to go with Drupal. We have been continually developing The Platform since then, launching sites on it (over 100 so far) as well as developing the middle-ware, commerce and analytics platforms.
We currently average launching two sites weekly on Drupal and as of today, have 101 sites active running Drupal in some fashion, plus the Digital Detail system which is the “brain” to the sites “faces.”
What does Krimson do and how did you first get involved with Drupal?
Krimson is Belgium's first fully dedicated Drupal company. I used Drupal for the school site of my eldest sun, and from then on I was totally hooked. I visited the Drupalcon in Brussels, which had the same size as the latest DrupalCamp in Cologne, and there I volunteered to start up a Belgian Drupal Community. That community has just finished our own Drupal Redesign Sprint to revamp http://drupal.be. Things grow fast with Drupal :)The first discussions about a dedicated Drupal shop started at the OpenSource CMS Conference at Yahoo's campus in Sunnyvale. At the same moment Dries was talking with Jay about creating Acquia, I was talking with Jo Wouters about creating Krimson. Similar discussions but a major difference in size.
Can you tell us a bit about a Drupal website you built lately that's particularly interesting?
As Drupal architects we are working for a big environmental organization in Belgium. They maintain about 20 websites for a lot of their environmental campaigns, and are struggling with maintenance (all different versions of a custom CMS, training, re-use of functionality). We've just launched three new websites. (see http://is.gd/k0kh). We are now in the process of taking this approach one step further and develop a strategy and infrastructure to allow them to become self-sustainable by next year. During the process we will help them to get about 7 or 8 websites on line in the coming months. We believe that this is something a lot of NGO's could use. There has been some interest from other social organizations and from political parties in this approach.
Instead of fixing their problems, we provide them with the tools (Drupal, Strategy and Training) so that they are able to solve their own problems in the future.
We are also very proud about the http://nrcboeken.nl website. This was a interesting project in the newspaper business, creating a big site (over 140,000 nodes all interconnected with each other) with back-end integration, webservices etc, daily and weekly data import from different sources, and using Drupal as the glue between all that information.
What does Zaloni do and how do you work with Drupal?
Zaloni provides content management and collaboration solutions for research, higher education and enterprise clients. We help our clients develop and deploy new and innovative applications to automate business process, enable collaboration and reach and motivate new audiences. We work with clients in Basic sciences, Life sciences and Biomedical research to help them bridge departmental, institutional or geographical boundaries thereby increasing their research productivity. Many of our projects involve custom integration of Drupal with third party applications, so that our clients can leverage their existing IT investments. We are a global company with current projects in US, Australia, and Israel.
How did you first get involved with Drupal?
Our foray into Drupal started with volunteering for a website for a public elementary school. We were impressed on how fast we could put together the site and make teachers and staff update their own content. From that point onwards, we have used Drupal for all of our content management and collaboration projects. Drupal’s extensible framework along with the large number of community contributed modules makes it very attractive as a platform for deploying content management solutions with custom integration.
What does CITI do and how do you work with Drupal?
Community IT Innovators (CITI) is an employee-owned company committed to helping social mission organizations effectively use technology. Since 1993, Community IT Innovators (CITI) has developed a successful, socially responsible mission-driven business model. We attract and retain highly skilled computer consultants committed to serving the nonprofit community. By combining technology expertise with a commitment to our clients' missions, we have provided unsurpassed service to more than 800 organizations.
CITI builds both small brochure sites based on drupal for local non-profits and large complex sites for international associations. CITI's drupal developers excel at integrating Drupal with existing systems, data migration, custom module development and empowering clients to understand how to leverage the full power the core and integral modules like CCK and Views.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
I was hired at CITI in March of 2007 to help start up an Open Source web development arm. CITI was already using OSS like MySQL and making all of our code available to clients, but they were looking to offer fully open source stack. We started looking at different CMSs like Joomla!, Plone and Drupal and in the end chose Drupal based on its community, developer-friendly code base and existing popularity with our client base of mission driven organizations.
Getting things up and running in an environment that was used to IIS and Coldfusion was a bit of a tough start, but we have some really smart people on board and everyone is always willing to learn new things. We got up to speed quickly and are coming into our own this year with launches of some pretty complex implementations and integrations.
What does Forum One do and how do you work with Drupal?
We help organizations use the web to tackle some the world's most pressing problems - health, education, poverty, and sustainable development, for example. We are a web-development firm, but most of our staff come from policy-oriented backgrounds - with real world NGO, nonprofit, or international development experience. Forum One has been around since 1996 and we have completed over 1,000 projects and launched somewhere around 300 web sites in those 13 years.
We use Drupal as the primary platform for deploying the web sites and applications we build for our clients. It's been great to watch the platform mature so quickly and gain such market share.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
Forum One has always been an open source shop, and so even before we were using Drupal on client projects we were watching it closely and evaluating it as it matured. About two years ago we started seeing a real tipping point happening. Organizations working in the public sector started to see the benefits of more collaborative, participatory web sites, and you started seeing really great sites launch that were Drupal-powered. It was about that time that we adopted it as a viable option for our clients. The first project that Forum One launched on Drupal was for Ashoka's Changemakers project - a social entrepreneurship competition site (www.changemakers.net) in 2007, and we've been using Drupal successfully ever since.