About a month ago we started to see some announcements from Ning that made us wonder whether trouble was brewing. Today Ning announced the end of their long time free online community service and a cut of nearly half of their staff. Although this bodes well for other online community platforms, there are a lot of nervous Ning customers out there today – some of our clients included.
Given today’s events, I thought I would take a moment to discuss one of the core values of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Free. As in Libre.
It doesn’t look much different than it did a month ago, but under the hood the most prominent website in U.S. government is now running the open source Drupal content management system. This apparently replaces an unknown proprietary CMS that was implemented during the Bush Administration.
On the heels of the high-profile Recovery.gov Drupal site launched earlier in the year, this is another big win for the Open Source community and an important stamp of approval for the Drupal system. Seeing a site with this level of prominence leverage Open Source technology will be noticed by governments and corporations around the world where Open Source has traditionally been looked at as not polished enough and not secure enough for mission critical operations. For direct web communications with the U.S. people, WhiteHouse.gov is about as mission critical as it gets.
Having worked through dozens of projects on Open Source content management systems, the government’s Drupal choice is not at all surprising. The evolution of the platform from it’s political roots during the Dean Campaign in 2004 is just extraordinary. Today, there is not much you can’t do on the platform with it’s robust developer API and with the thousands of modules contributed to the project by the community.
Although we don’t have access to all the specific Drupal modules in place (I’d love to see it), we did notice a few interesting tidbits via a look at the page source:
- Related blog posts appear to be handled by the Views module (no surprise there)
- The popular AddThis link sharing service is being used
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WebTrends is keeping track of your visits (Sorry, Google Analytics)
- The beautiful slideshow on the homepage is built with jQuery
- Contributed module Galleria is getting some use in the Photo Galleries
- And in case you were wondering, yes, the robots.txt file is still only two lines long, slightly shorter than 2,400 present during the prior Administration
Have you uncovered more details? Let us know in the comments. It’ll be interesting to see how this site evolves in the coming months and years knowing that Drupal is under the hood.
Update 10/26/2009 – More Open Source in government. The SEC’s Investor.gov site launched a few days ago on WordPress, our other favorite platform.
On July 2nd, a post by Jake Goldman that was originally published here on the C. Murray Consulting Blog was enhanced and republished on Smashing Magazine. The post began as five quick tips for implementing WordPress as a Content Management System and grew into an in-depth, essential guide for leveraging WordPress as a full-featured website CMS.
Read the full post on Smashing Magazine
The post highlights real-life examples from some of our recent WordPress implementations:
Congratulations to Jake for creating such valuable tips and making them available to the open source community. Thanks also to Smashing Magazine for distributing the article.
I’ve been working with website content management systems for 9 years or so – since the last time our economy took a bit of a nose-dive. Around that time there was a flood of discussion about the ROI of implementing a Content Management System (CMS), mostly written by vendors trying to sell very expensive software in a down market. We’re in a similar economic situation now, but over the past 9 years two big things have changed:
- The cost of CMS software has decreased exponentially since 2000
- Site visitor expectations have increased exponentially since 2000
Continue reading Content Management System (CMS) ROI – Not Just About Cutting Costs Anymore
Just in case you haven’t noticed the new Twitter button on our Blog pages, we’re . Follow us to learn more about what we’re up to in real time.
Mobile-optimized websites have been on our radar for a couple of years, and while we’ve devoted some time for research and prototyping, until now, clients rarely considered mobile an important part of their overall web strategy. But since our e-calendars virtually flipped to 2009, we’ve had several clients revisit the mobile web question, and have already queued up a couple of exciting projects.
Some of our partners have been hard at work making their systems mobile friendly. Salesforce.com has a fabulous recently released an iPhone optimized version for their social networks. WordPress, one of our most popular content management platforms, has released an iPhone application for managing posts and offers several plug-ins for basic mobile blog views.
In a blog post about the progress of the mobile web this morning, Jakob Nielsen says that the Mobile Web of 2009 = the Desktop Web of 1998. Think about that for a minute. In 1998 there was no . Google didn’t exist yet, nor did Salesforce.com.
Seems to us, there’s work to be done.
Over the last year we’ve helped several clients deploy social networks on the Ning platform. Our early Ning deployments were elegant, but traditional: we helped member organizations create rich, dynamic online member communities. Recently, we’ve been breaking out of that box.
Earlier this year, we customized an instance of Ning for FIRST Credit Union in British Columbia, creating a social network that enables their staff to meet up and share ideas online. The project included a custom design (implemented via CSS), custom home page components (via the Ning API), and some creative hiding and renaming of core features (using CSS and JavaScript).
Continue reading Introducing the “Ning-tranet”
The Importance of the End Goal
We often receive web project inquiries that look something like this: “Please give us a quote for how much it would cost to get XYZ”. “XYZ” is usually a nice bulleted list consisting of requirements such as a content management system, online event registration, a member-only web community, a blog, a forum, integration with a Salesforce database, and so on.
We do these things really well. By leveraging existing systems and adding some custom code, we are able to deliver a great set of tools with great Salesforce integration. Just what they wanted, right?
Here’s the problem: Too often those lists of requirements are based entirely on what a CEO loosely articulated, what a competitor did last month, some blog reading, or a lot of friends with opinions. A recent post on Smashing Magazine – 7 Essential Guidelines for Functional Design – is a good read for those considering the “XYZ” approach.
At C. Murray Consulting, our best success stories consistently come from projects where we’ve had the opportunity to engage with clients at the requirements level – to put everything on the table and leave no question unasked. When we understand our clients’ needs at least as well as they do (maybe even better), we’re able to leverage our Web expertise to tell them what they really need, why they need it, and the best way to get there.
Continue reading The Importance of the End Goal