Media24 goes opensource with Drupal?
It’s not too often we see large media companies embracing Open Source technologies, so it is really great to see one of South Africa’s large media houses embracing Drupal, an Open Source CMS.
This morning I read an Aricle on bizcommunity outlining the launch of gotravel24.co.za. In general the site promotes travel in and around South Africa. GoTravel24 also allows users to create travel blogs (Using their existing blogging platform),book hotels, rental cars, flights and find specials etc.
What got me really interested in the site, was the voting feature - A Drupal module! At first I thought it must be the script from which the Drupal voting module was based, however upon further investigation I found references to Drupal in the source.
I am not personally a fan of Drupal. However I must say it is great to see it feuling a Media 24 site. Media24 have done a great job at modifying what I believe is the newsflash theme.
Drupal…blah! Though as far as Drupal sites go it’s not too bad…
Drupal is awesome… huge and vast and complex but really powerful. I am creating my first community site in at current and although the learning curve is quite steep I am constantly amazed at the quality and stability of the modules contributed.
I hope to see more Drupal coverage on Nobox…
I would be interested too to hear what about Drupal it is that makes you not such a fan :)
Drupal rocks! Love it, good work Media24!
Hi Robin
Thanks for noticing. This is the first project I’ve lead using open source at 24.com, and I must say a very positive experience. We also adopted an agile development methodology for this project, called Scrum - also with very positive results.
Regards
Bryan Porter
Manager
GoTravel24.com
@Gregg: Over the past few years I have developed a few sites using Drupal, ranging from video streaming using ffmpeg for conversion to social mechanics using dozens of modules.
In my limited experience (I only did a few sites then gave up on Drupal), I found it a jack of all trades but a master of none. For example it has a number of blog related modules which are no where near to the sophistication found in Wordpress. It has news publishing features that cannot be compared to Joomla. It has dozens of social netowrking/community modules, but in no way is it even close to Dolphins league.
I also found allot of the modules to be rather immature (Absolute paths, no use of primary keys, spaghetti code) and buggy. For example acidrain (grrr), a photo album/gallery module. It was the most buggy snippet of code I have used, I ended up spending many nights re-writing the entire module. Another issue I have with Drupal is its admin section. It is extremely difficult for non techies, such as many clients, to figure out.
All in all I would say it is ok for small company or personal sites, but when developing larger more sophisticated sites, in the long run you will in all likelihood spend more time modifying modules to work properly and in a manner you feel suitable than the time it would take to write the site from scratch.
All that being said, the great thing about Drupal is that it is a community effort, meaning it will only grow and result in a more refined community building platform. So perhaps someday I will be able to reunite with Drupal and continue our love/hate relationship…
@Bryan: Pigs&chickens/Scrum rocks!
What I found really interesting about the site was the integration of the hotel, car and flight booking mechanics. Any chance you could divulge how it was achieved (In terms of third party integration)? I know it’s a long shot but I’m itching to know and it never hearts to ask right :-)
Again, great work on the site, it is one of the top implementations of Drupal I have seen to date.
Hi Robin
Thank once again for the compliments… It never hurts to ask, but no :)
Cheers
Bryan
@Bryan: lol, it was worth a try :-)