Oh YEAH! The community of programmers at the recent Drupalcon in Boston was a passionate mob of some of the best minds in web creation. They’ve built a great product, and it’s about to hit the mainstream — in a torrential flood of mass adoption.

What sites should run Drupal?

Yours.

What is Drupal? A content and community management system. In a nutshell, everything your CMS does, Drupal does it better.

The key point for the hundreds of Drupal developers in Boston? From the creator of Drupal himself, Dries Buytaert, “Release the Killer App.”

Buytaert outlined a few key improvements to meet this ambitious goal that are in the works for Drupal version 7, due in a few months. Future killer app release aside, the features and benefits of Drupal are already very apparent in the latest implementations.

Drupal shops demonstrated several impressive case studies in Boston, with a wide range of product goals and technological implementations. The key point? It’s not just “Freaks and geeks” that are using Drupal for their World of Warcraft blogs.*

So what can one create with Drupal?

Drupal boasts over 3,400 “modules.” These code sets bolt on to one’s Core Drupal site in minutes — or as fast as your server can accept file transfers… With these modules, some Drupal rockstar developers and themers and some great team leaders, these are six examples of the amazing creations that are possible.

Popular Science (www.popsci.com)

“We wanted to practice what we preach.” - The PopSci Team.

Pingvision, one of the newish self-described ‘Drupal shops’ worked with the PopSci Interactive team to produce the online presence of the famous print magazine devoted to innovation. You can read the full case study here.

Pingvision developed a blog-style interface with publishing and workflow managment for the content creators. To meet some of the specifications, Pingvision’s developers created new modules, and is currently making them available for all Drupal users.

Zuda Comics (www.zudacomics.com)

“IBM endorses and implements Drupal.” — Oliver Siodmak, Associate Partner, IBM Global Business Services

Zuda is DC Comics’ foray into online community for comic readers — a market that is nowhere near the size of the 90s equivalent, but one that is even more passionate than ever. Zuda attempts to find the next Superman, 300 or 30 days of night, comic books-turned movies that have built cash-raking brands for DC.

Comic creators can submit their work to the community for rating. Popular work can earn these artists and writers huge opportunity in the form of a contract with DC.

IBM produced the site, executing a brilliant theme and interface for reading and rating comics on screen. The full case study is here.

Fast Company (www.fastcompany.com)

“We spent a lot of money on that, and now it’s yours.” — Ed Sussman, Fast Company Team Lead on sharing a customized module with the Drupal community.

At the Boston Drupalcon, the hybrid team of multiple companies presenting new Fast Company online community seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. The 120-pages of information architecture proved to be a challenge to Drupalize; the 500K strong existing community from Fast Company’s legacy site was obviously a task to integrate; and the hard launch date required to unveil at the Inc500 conference was unforgiving, but the outcome is impressive.

See the case study here.

Fast Company 2.0-ifyed it’s community with new tools, a new interface and a new spike in engagement. The team reports acceleration in traffic and time-on-site. If you join one site on this list, make it this one.

Warner Bros. Records Artists’ Communities

“The web site is the centre of the company.” — Ethan Kaplan, Warner Bros. Head of Technology

Warner Bros. has fully embraced Drupal as their solution-of-choice for all of their artists’ web sites. Fans of Britney (whoops, Britney.com’s been Drupalized, but she ain’t on Warner Bros., she’s on Sony BMG, so I dunno, let’s go with) Ashley Tisdale, Josh Groban, Avenged Sevenfold, Michael Buble and My Chemical Romance are enjoying new communities built around their respective and unique needs and wants.

The Warner Bros. web team boasted speed to market as one Drupal’s main benefits — they have launched more than 50 web communities in the past year, with unique databases, modules and themes (wild and crazy pink for Britney’s young fans; sparkling head shots and big type for Josh Groban’s more mature audience). The sites’ retention, according to the technical lead, easily quadruples when they switch from the one-way flash sites to Drupal’s user-empowering engine.

Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org)

Developer and business teams around the world worked together to produce the new Amnesty International web site. This implementation features Drupal’s highly-scalable localization (translation) module, including RTL (right-to-left for Arabic). CivicActions developed the site to add future languages with ease. Read the full case study here.

Rockband (www.rockband.com)

… And Drupal’s okay with Flash too. Check out Rockband’s appropriately loud and abrasive experience for a great example.

You can download Drupal at www.Drupal.org and start building your community.

Filed under: CMS, Community, Drupal, Web 2.0, Web Strategy by Craig Ritchie
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Tags: amnesty.org, chris dibona, CMS, Community, dc comics, dries buytaert, Drupal, fast company, google, ibm, open source, popsci, rockband, warner bros, world of warcraft, zuda comics