In an Iron Chef-like match up, a team of developers from each CMS had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team would appear face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival. I had the chance to attend the face off and found it to be very fun to watch.

It was a battle to the end. With a mix of good humor and serious competition, leaders from Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress met face to face during a Monday session called “The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny” at South by Southwest. The panelists included Steve Fisher (Joomla!), Colleen Carroll (Drupal), and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and led by George DeMet of Palantir.net. The room was packed full of CMS fans, with a heavy emphasis on WordPress. You could hear a small group of men chanting for their favorite CMS before the event got underway. The mood was festive but there was an air of competition brewing as each person threw CMS taunts at each other.

DeMet came up with the idea and explained how each team of developers were given the task to build a website for a community leadership program in Elgin, Illinois. The developers were asked to use a number of web-based social networking and collaboration tools. The end goal is to build websites that are general enough to be able to be downloaded by organizations and communities to meet their needs. All of the specifications are listed on Palantir.net’s blog or available in a PDF format. The teams were also expected to stay true to a site design created by Mark Boulton who is well-known for his web design and book, “Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web“. Developers could only use freely-available software to build the sites and function on a shared hosting space (Linux/Apache/MySQL).

A lot of time was spent talking about how the teams worked together on the site creation and the effort it took to build the sites. The Joomla! team never met face-to-face. Developers spanned across the globe and spent most time talking over Skype or conference calls. The Drupal team started with a face-to-face sprint to get the site started and then they worked together to finish the rest of the work. You can follow how Mullenweg’s WordPress team completed their tasks by visiting  a site they built to keep up with the project. Here is a comparison of how the sites came together under deadline:

DeMet mentioned how most validation errors were minor. But Carroll said the Drupal Community learned a lot from the discovery of those errors and they were able to put in a number of new patches to help improve the overall CMS. Mullenweg and Fischer said this project helped in similar ways. Mullenweg talked about how his team had a great time outside of the development by adding Zoolander-related content. The added fun was not a requirement. The Drupal and Joomla! teams added filler to populate their sites.

The crowd seemed pretty disappointed when it became clear there would be no live demonstrations of the websites. All of the sites can be viewed from the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny website. They did get to hear reactions from Boulton and Senior Program Officer Marybeth Schroeder from the Evanston Community Foundation. DeMet had worked with the organization before and used its needs to launch the competition in the first place. The crowd enjoyed watching her reaction as she looked through each versions of the website. Schroeder had no CMS preference before looking at the sites, a perspective that was not easy to find in the SXSW session. There was an attempt to record how she used each site. In one screen capture video, you could see her trying to figure out the WordPress dashboard. In the case of the Joomla! site, Schroeder had a hard time adding a location for an event.

From the designer perspective, Boulton said he favored the WordPress and Drupal sites for how they stayed true to his design. He gave Joomla! a hit for not following all of his typography. Fisher countered that they made that decision because the Joomla! team didn’t like it. Boulton did not say anything specifically about the usefulness or user experience of the sites.

In what was expected to be a dramatic end to the competition, DeMet asked the crowd to vote on who should win. Many people yelled out how they felt they did not have enough knowledge of the sites to pick. Others yelled out the CMS they already supported. That indecisiveness let to a draw. DeMet announced all three CMS won and tried to figure out a way to share the belt-buckle award.

There may be no defined answer on what is the best open source CMS. It was clear this project helped motivate the open source communities to team together and come up with products that can help non-profits launch a website that meets their needs. Each development team will make their work available for anyone to use. The Joomla! and WordPress teams even created help videos on the showdown website. The event at SXSW was also a great way to talk about CMS and get open source products more play among a large and growing population of tech-minded people who are looking for a new way to share information online.

DeMet plans to talk about the showdown again in April at a pre-conference event for the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois.

A couple of fun things came out during this session. First, the WordPress song is TOO funny. Also, you can enjoy this Drupal song. There was a Joomla! song but I can’t find it online, plus it’s instrumental and a bit boring compared to the other two!

(You can see a similar version of this post at CMSwire.com)

I’ve never attended a DrupalCon before… and I have to say, it’s fantastic to talk to people and learn about what’s going on with this open source CMS. But the best things I’ve learned have come from side conversations and small unofficial sessions called Birds of a Feather or BoFs. I’ve been able to meet other wonderful journalists and media specialists who really care about the industry. I’ve also learned about a fantastic initiative the Knight Foundation set up called the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI). It was a very quickly set up initiative where the Knight Foundation recognized the flexibility and potential of Drupal… and how a bit of funding could help this open source tool improve dramatically. One of the initiative’s first grants went to Addison Berry who wants to build up to date handbooks so more people can understand how to use Drupal. I’m really excited about Berry’s plans. I attended her “Documentation is Hot” presentation yesterday and I think she’s doing an incredible thing for Drupal and the community people who know Drupal is powerful but we can’t figure it out on our own (like me!).

I had a chance to attend the KDI BoF (like how I used all of the acronyms in one sentence?) yesterday where participants and organizers talked about what could happen in the future. They’re unsure if they’ll hold another KDI grant process again. I really hope they do. During this conference I’ve had a chance to talk and scheme with a wonderful Twitter user named Margaret Rosas (@mrosas). She’s out in Santa Cruz doing wonderful work for public media (with the help of a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant). We understand each other and I love her cause. She explains how she hopes to align an Army of Geeks on the MediaShift Idea Lab. I think the KDI could help her extend this vision to locations beyond Santa Cruz. I would love to help build a Drupal community in Columbia, MO. There really isn’t one… And my time here has helped me learn about the Drupal Groups site and how many journalists are building community there. I didn’t even know! So I am now a member of Drupal Groups. You can find me here and watch as I join more groups and find new ways to learn about Drupal. I will never stop learning so I can continue to teach the best I can. I really to do want to arm Mizzou’s future journalists with an arsenal that will allow them to be good journalists who can do good work AND eat under a roof.

By the way – my attempt at holding a Mizzou J-School alumni meetup was a success last night. There were six former students who came from a range of graduation years between May of 2003 (right before I started working at the journalism school) all the way through December 2008. It was wonderful catching up, drinking a couple of beers and giving alumni members a chance to meet each other. Hooray last minute gatherings set up over Twitter and Facebook!

I’d love to hear what other folks think about CMS and portability.

Also – Since I’m in DC, I’m setting up an impromptu gathering for Mizzou alumni and any of my Twitter/blog followers if they’re interested:

It would be great to hang out, enjoy a beer in a hipster kind of place.

McGerevan said the New York Observer takes a lot of the essential elements of Drupal and uses them in the newsroom. The newsroom operates in a way where most things are published to the web and then changed, improved, repackaged and put into the print publication. He says the news product more native to the web in its workflow. But they haven’t built any custom workflow into the CMS. They have customized Drupal for editorial needs. They found templates and ways to package content to do the things they need. In their recent relaunch of the site, they have editors applying a weight to a story. That determines how much prominence it has on the site. No more scheduling of the story items. It’s a thought process that is more web native. I really like that!

McClatchy’s workflow is rapidly developing. When they first started experimenting with the CMS, they were looking at standalone builds. They saw a lot of instances where affiliate IT departments were using Drupal as a back end or adding widget items into existing CMS. The Drupal commenting system is the only thing they would use it for. But as McClatchy newsrooms gain more knowledge, they’re using it more. Some newsrooms want to use it as a primary data entry site to feed the content into their core CMS and eventually use it to the print product.

Aster said Mother Jones used to consider itself as a magazine that happens to have a website. Now they’re working with the belief that they’re a 24 hour news agency. That thought process started changing when they introduced blogs two years ago. The web-focused workflow is more relaxed and once people realized that is a better process, the use of Drupal was welcomed. This process also created a less complex approval and permissions process to get articles and blogs published to the site.

The first thing that came to my mind was whether the newsrooms are working on any Agile development concepts using Drupal. Apparently McClatchy used Drupal to build a mom community in only a week and a half! I think that’s amazing. If I was able to build a functioning community site in that short amount of time, I could have four or five test projects running! Okay. Maybe three.

It was interesting to see where the conversations were going with the session. There was more culture talk and workflow talk than an actual discussion in how Drupal functions. I kind of really wanted to talk about Drupal functions. But the discussion turned to how did the newsrooms change culturally to become web-focused. The one thing that stood out from all three men was how all three newsrooms have an open source environment. They all said it made sense to work with an open source product. That was so great to hear. I’ve hit snag after snag from cultures that don’t work with Drupal’s flow.

The one workflow item that I really enjoyed hearing about what how Mother Jones is using Drupal’s features to create more of a community through online readers and potential contributors. Mother Jones wants to be able to share investigative journalism online where the community can help steer the conversations into solutions. The magazine added two little flags in Drupal where the comment can be a recommended solution or a documented result on behalf of the problem.

In the end, I got the feeling that the room was full of people bursting to talk about journalism and how we can find really great solutions for the industry… and the possibility that Drupal is one of those solutions. One person asked if Drupal was a fad… I mentioned that statement on Twitter. Ben Shoemate, who I finally met in person after talking on Twitter, mentioned to me that he felt that question was a bit dramatic. The real question is this: Do these newsrooms all expect to switch content management systems every two years? That’s when I really figured out why we’re doing all of this.

We are looking for solid CMS that is flexible enough to do what we want it to do today and what we’ll want it to do tomorrow. And if it isn’t flexible enough tomorrow, it needs to be able to export all of its data easily to prevent an ugly CMS divorce. That’s what matters. It doesn’t matter if Drupal or WordPress or Django are the fads. What matters more is if we don’t like the CMS, we can export, get out and move on without losing data.

So that’s where the question of output of web content that can go right into the print system becomes very important. If you can export web content to go into a newspaper, then you can export all of your content into archives or into an alternate CMS.

I’d love to hear what you think!

There are 1400 people attending this event!

First and foremost, Drupal is a content management system. It helps you manage a website built onto a framework. Drupal was made to be flexible to do what you want it to do. The CMS framework that makes it so flexible are constructed from APIs (Application Programming Interface). It does all kinds of bits of code that let you do tasks so you don’t have to hand code your website. It’s wrapped up in a nice little package for you. Drupal has a ton of APIs that are built as “modules.”

Here’s when the discussion gets deeply nerdy. If you aren’t interested in code… Here’s what I learned. There is a step by step process that helps Drupal function. It looks for all of the things you want to happen with the site and then it delivers that content to the site’s look or theme. If you think through what you want, the code comes together for you. If you build it and then try to make changes on top of your structure, things break. Also, the theme is more powerful than the actual code. It can trump the code… or the theme can fight the code. I’m pretty sure that’s another problem I found during my Smart Decision ’08 experience.

The sites folder that comes with a Drupal install is what you would probably mess around with. But the includes folder is actually worth looking into. It gives you the lay of the land and tells you what you’re working with. (http://api.drupal.org information is all in this file. It’s your own reference to explain things for you.) You can learn about the common functions of Drupal code. These functions are a little machine.

Drupal has a concept called “hooks.” It’s a naming convention. hook_* where hook is replaced by your module name. It lets you create a system where a module defines the system and another hook can connect with another hook.

Hook example: Think of Drupal of a train. It looks for a hook_perm function (each is a train car) in your module file. The API tells you what needs to go into it. Drupal searches through the whole site and grabs the items that have a hook_perm. Drupal grabs all of the cars (module perm files) and then it goes to the themes where you can snag alter functions. It’s a step by step process to get the site to do what you want it to do. Once it gets to the theme, that’s when it gets pretty. So once the site has all of the “look” and it delivers the content to a web browser. The hook system is why Drupal works… but it’s also why it can be challenging if you try to fight the hook process. If you work from the beginning to build a site following the hook process… then you won’t get in big trouble> Most troubles hapeen when you try to hook on extra stuff after you’ve built the basics of site. Ugly things happen… and that’s where I hit major snags with smartdecision08.com.

Menu function (in the includes folder as menu.inc) – Drupal needs the menu system functions that make it work. The menu system is not the menu module. The system works like a router – that’s how Drupal knows how to produce anything on your site. The menu system maps URLs to take you to that site. Without the menu system, the site won’t work. The menu module is not needed – it’s just the UI for you to graphically create navigation for a site. (most people don’t turn it off)

Form API (FAPI) – is a “thing of beauty” but most people get scared. The form API lets you build forms on your site. Drupal FAPI – form.inc has all of the functions in there. It handles the form, validation and submission. Instead of building it with HTML tags, it is just an element in the array – a big PHP array for every single thing. Drupal takes that array information and turns it into the HTML for you. Why would you let Drupal do it? It doesn’t just create a form, it does the security and verification for you as well. The idea is FAPI takes care of all of the security stuff. You just list out what you want in the form and Drupal takes care of it for you. Drupal has your own default and submission process. You can change it to have required and non-required elements. You have complete control when you build your own form module. When you’re trying to alter a form someone else built, you can go in it and tweak it (which is how I do anything in code). It’s great when you know what you’re doing… frustrating when you don’t. But once you get it, it’s a much easier way to build forms.

Databases – database.inc and database*.inc are in the includes folder. When you need a new table, insert new tables and take out tables, this will do it for you. This helps you securely pass and share information without a concern of breaking security holes (SQL stuff that I don’t know). You can just pick all the items you want for a database, it will build it for you. Just tell it what fields and tables you want and Drupal will do it for you.

Theme layer – is the last step. There’s an include files (theme.inc). It runs the entire theme system. It’s how Drupal gets output. Information runs through the theme to output to the front side of the web world. Drupal has a system module that has default tpls files (template files). Drupal by default has block, box and page template files in the system module folder. Blocks are a module – but the system has a block section as well. The core html output goes into a tpl file inside modules folder. If you want to change the tpl file – go into the system module, it will automatically change everything you want. page.tpl is what is most often changed. Anytime you want to modify html, see if there’s a template file to work on. Copy it, paste it and go.

In the end, themes rule. It controls everything in the end. Module output uses theme()
The order of priority is theme_function_name() (is there a theme function?)
phptemplate_function_name() (the engine of drupal)
mytheme_function_name() (final item that trumps all – it gives you total control of everything)
Copy and paste function into anything you want – change the logic, the wording… anything you want. It trumps anything the coders did for the site. Themers end up trumping the coders. When it comes to output the theme has control and this is probably where I’ve also hit snags. The code sometimes doesn’t agree with a theme. If you keep the module code really generic, it allows the theme to give it control on a lower level and the module can be used multiple times.

Yikes. I think I kind of picked up on the way Drupal actually works!!
Resources
Developer/Theme handbooks
Drupal source/api.drupal.org
Dev/Theme mailing lists (drupal.com/mailing-lists)
IRD:#drupal (#drupal-dev) #drupal-themes
Issue queues
Paper books: http://drupal.org/books

Those are my notes and I promise to go through that and improve what I’m trying to say. I promise.

I just got into DC to attend this week’s DrupalCon. I’m pretty excited but also a bit overwhelmed. I’m not really a coder, but I want to be friends with one or ten. I’d love their thoughts on my experiences on projects I’m working on. I’m not really able to post much tonight, but hopefully I’ll be able to tweet the events while I’m at the conference.

But that isn’t enough. I learned a lot in our previous Smart Decision 08 project. I don’t want to lose momentum… So I’m working on creating a way to bubble up great journalism in the thick of the failing economy. I’d like to launch a collaborative effort based on the economy and try to become a central hub of information and collaboration in a time of uncertainty and need. Here are my initial thoughts that have come through many meetings and late noodling before I fall asleep at night:

1) This site needs to launch soon – I’m thinking about building a blog system (possibly WordPress?) at first and then consider building something more extensive in Drupal as our needs grow.
2) I’d like to launch it by asking as many people in the mid-Missouri area to tell us (the journalists) what is important to them. I want them to lead us towards the stories we need to tell.
3) This could be a great opportunity to team up with some of the journalism students who are in the earlier classes. They could help gather simple evergreen information that can help make the site really helpful for our community
4) I need to play with my own server space until the university is willing to open up a server space outside of our firewall that allows us to play with open source platforms. I’ve said this for at least two years. I haven’t won this battle yet.

While I try to noodle on these ideas, I’m packing for a big family trip to Florida so I can see my parents and enjoy the beach. I realize I never brain dump enough on this blog and it will be my resolution next year to share my thoughts more often and openly as I try to make the most out of my fellowship time.

At the same time, I hope I can use my university knowledge to help guide my fellow fellows Jane Stevens and Matt Thompson’s projects into the future beyond their fellowship. It would be wonderful to take advantage of their hard work and help find ways to institutionalize their ideas into the workflow of our newsrooms. It’s going to be an amazing four months. At the same time I hope to continue to work with my other fellow fellows (Bill Densmore and Mike Fancher) and faculty fellow (Margaret Duffy) to take full advantage of all of our amazing projects!

That’s why I started working with Camtasia. It’s a fantastic screen capture program. There’s an even bigger and better version that recently came out. Either way, it’s been really handy to use it. I can combine my ability to edit on an Avid Newscutter and combine video with the screen captures from Camtasia. In the end, my students have a .swf video they can link to from any computer. When they’re confused, they don’t have to ask me. It has saved me a bunch of time. If only I had more time to do MORE videos.

Since I don’t have a ton of time to do that, I’ve been lucky to work with a great student, Jonathan Coffman. We put together a database structure using Drupal. I have a growing training manual for all of my students and employees. It’s easy to search, it’s easy to read and it’s easy to update. I’ve found I can save a lot of time with the database as well.

I’d love to hear what others are doing to save time, share information and do it with little cost (other than the time it takes to set it all up).