Opera at SXSW 2008

Panelists:
George DeMet, Owner, Palantir.net
Matthew McDermott, Principal Consultant, Catapult Systems
Jeff Eaton, Lullabot (Drupal Consulting Training Group)
Mike Essl, Owner Operator, mike.essl.com
Tiffany Farriss, Pres, Palantir.net

McDermott led off with SharePoint. He showed some examples of entities using sharepoint, among them westernaustrialia.com and Viacom. McDermott noted that design-wise, it’s not really anything new: “From a design perspective, it’s essentially the same as everything you’re going to hear here today.” Sharepoint looked fine, but I couldn’t quite figure out how “free” it is…McDermott mentioned “free” at one point with scare quotes, so it seems that you don’t get much for “free.” Also, it’s a Microsoft product, so it’s not free as in free beer and it’s also not free as in open source/free speech.

Next was Drupal. Jeff Eaton began by asking how many folks were familiar with Drupal. Nearly EVERY PERSON raised their hand. Big time geek crowd. Of course, he began with the biggest selling point of Drupal: it’s open source. I was one of the geeks (and John is a geek too.) Eaton showed off a bunch of Drupal sites: Lifetime Television, MTVUK, and FastCompany. There are about 3,000 Drupal modules available (one allows you to login to a Drupal site with your Facebook account info)—this is the advantage of open source. Eaton went through the nuts and bolts of Drupal, which most of the crowd probably didn’t need. Mostly, I came out of his presentation feeling the same way I did going in—Drupal is pretty great. I fully admit I'm a kool-aid drinker on this one.

Essl talked about Expression Engine, and I was impressed. His EE site is [URL= http://www.mrtandme.com/mrt/main/]Mr. T and me. First of all, he claimed his site had “no custom php at all” (though, he went back on this later in the talk.) At the very least, you can do a lot without php. This is an advantage over Drupal, which is very flexible but doing really advanced stuff can require some php knowledge. One great thing that EE offers is a paid support staff on the forums. Drupal forums are driven by volunteers, and I’ve never had a problem getting an answer to a question—but it is nice knowing that there’s a staff dedicated to answering questions.

Farriss claimed that her company (Palantir.net) was CMS agnostic, so she took us through a case study of one of their clients; [URL= http://www.artic.edu/]The Art Institute of Chicago. At first, they designed the site with custom php until the Art Institute decided on a CMS. Using dreamweaver and a custom CMS, they were able to do quite a bit. But, one of the disadvantages of this approach was that the “band aid” design ended up being permanent. This custom cms ended up looking fine, but it meant that no new pages were ever added to the site. Farriss then moved on to a discussion of Serena Collage. Collage looked good, but there are disadvantages. First, you don’t have access to the database. Farriss listed some pros (master pages, good for workflow, version control, breadcrumbs, training users was easy) and some cons (expensive licensing costs, excruciatingly slow interface, not Mac-friendly, training developers was very difficult and tedious.) So, it turns out that Palintir ended up not being agnostic at all—they moved to Drupal and used it for the Art Institute website. Now, the Art Institute can add pages easily. For Fariss, the pros of Drupal are: powerful templating, remote data handling, user management, Jquery integration, solid framework, ability to write own modules. Cons? Reverse proxy difficult in Drupal 5, uncertainty of the release of Drupal 6.