Acquia Quotes

The following are four significant impacts I believe social publishing will have on the CMS market.

1. Content management systems will become a niche application. Over the past couple years, I have loosely defined forum applications (SMF, phpBB), wiki applications (mediaWiki), and blogging applications (WordPress) as niche or subsystems of the Web CMS. Under Whatcott’s model, content management now becomes a pattern or subsystem of the SPS.

"That is a system that would have cost a half a million dollars...The stuff that I am able to build with Drupal that scales and handles load and does the kind of stuff I am want to do is just mind-blowing. And I find it very easy to use."

It's pretty clear that the social Web is driving the demand for open source frameworks and with the mindset of "social publishing" continuing to be on Web agendas everywhere, look for community-led expansion and innovation to accelerate.

Smart companies realize the social part of the Web isn't leaving the party anytime soon and have made their demands clear. They want to be their own media companies, creating and distributing content globally on their own terms. If vendors can't provide the tools, they'll find their own.

I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it's important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive.

But for all of those brands that don't want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers, your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you. They're going to do it, no matter what, either way.

That's social publishing.

By any standard, Drupal is a FOSS success story, with more than 900 contributors to the recently announced version 6.0, and some 1,800 modules supplementing the core functionality.

It's a tall undertaking, but if the social publishing opportunities I'm seeing in the marketplace are indicative of a larger shift, watch out for that funny little Drupal icon. It might be appearing in your browser sooner than you think.

“In my opinion we can now add the founder of the open source content management system Drupal (and its commercial startup Acquia) Dries Buytaert to the rock star list.”

We're expecting to grow from a million page views a month to a million page views a day over the next year. Taking Drupal into that realm is a huge challenge. Having a commercially supported distribution from a strong company just might allow me to get some sleep at night.

“I love my CMS!” is rarely heard when it comes to web site management, so it’ll be fun to watch Acquia help the overall Drupal community service that lack of love.

I wasn’t sure how big the Acquia opportunity would be when I first heard about it from Dries, but it looks like a great opportunity for the company and for the Drupal community. I wish them the best of luck.