I’ve just finished Day 1 of DrupalCon here in Washington, DC. The session topics were varied and thought provoking.

I went to:

  • The Themer’s Toolkit
  • The Keynote: State of Drupal by Dries (which was awesome)
  • Drupal in the Newsroom, from Mother Jones to New York Observer
  • Drupal Module Developement Kickstart
  • Beyond the Web: Drupal Meets the Desktop
  • Going Live: Content Scheduling With Slot Machine

I won’t bore you with all the details of these sessions. But let me highlight a couple of things as it pertains to newspapers.

There are 1400 Drupalers here this year. That’s 600+ more than last year’s conference in Boston. I’m sure there would have been more, but the conference sold out! This speaks to the community and enthusiasm behind Drupal.

There are a lot of newspaper and magazine people here. I have no way of knowing how many, but I’ve already met 3 new people this year from the newspaper industry. And one of them was from Sweden.

Dries gave a very good overview of how Drupal has evolved from a class project to a full blow content management system. He gave an excellent presentation that I can best sum up by saying we can’t understand and plan the future of Drupal until we reflect and process the history of Drupal.

The “Drupal in the Newsroom” session was interesting in how it spun into how to deal with commenting on newspaper and magazine’s web sites. We are all struggling with how to make these comments relevant instead of annoying. Nick Aster from Mother Jones magazine has some great insight into this as did Allen Freeman from McClatchy Interactive. Here’s their presentation if you would like to listen for yourself.

Nick’s angle was to somehow create a way of collecting these comments and serve them back to the reader as more of a solution to a problem. This would help weed out some of the nonsense. Possible solutions here are allowing users to tag comments as a solution or recommend a comment. The more votes a comment gets the higher up the thread it would go. I like the idea of empowering the community to do things like this. Another key point was getting the reporters and editors involved in the conversation. And please note the use of the word “conversation” over comments. That’s essentially what’s going on here. But the reporter and editor’s voices are missing from the conversation. What a perfect venue for a newspaper or magazine to engage it’s audience on a daily basis.

What is also worth noting here is McClatchy as well as Morris Interactive have embraced Drupal. These are two very large media companies. The reasons why Drupal is popular are varied, but one common reason is the Drupal Community. There is no other CMS that I’m aware of that has this large, or enthusiastic, community around it.

If you are in the publishing business you should, if you’re not already, take a hard look at Drupal. I cannot think of any reason why a news organization should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a proprietary system. Out of the box it will do the same if not more than any system you will purchase. Don’t embrace Drupal simply because it’s free. Embrace it because of the community and it kicks ass.

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