DrupalCon 2010 -- Plenty of Innovation for Nonprofits

By Rowan Price May 01, 2010

Drupal is an important tool for our clients, so Freeflow sent a delegation to San Francisco in April to DrupalCon 2010, the annual Drupal conference. My colleague Chris Clark and I were the lucky delegates.

If the conference had one overriding theme, it was definitely innovation -- lots of smart people are pushing Drupal in multiple new and useful directions. Without a doubt, nonprofits will be able take advantage of these initiatives to get more bang for their buck out of their technology investments. These are few areas of Drupal innovation that stood out:

1. Mobile: Using Drupal as a Framework For Generating Mobile sites, and iPhone/Android Apps. The DrupalCon conference site itself is one of the most useful mobile sites I've used recently -- built on Drupal of course (visit it with your mobile web browser to try it out). It’s no secret that mobile usage is skyrocketing (it’s even projected to surpass "fixed" internet). Supplying mobile users with your organization's content, and tools, might become a strategic priority. There were two excellent sessions on Drupal and mobile: Developing Apps for iPhone/iPad/Android using Drupal as Base System, and iPhone, Drupal, and Web Services.

2. Cloud Hosting: Harnessing Drupal to the Cloud. DrupalCon made it clear that in the past year, Drupal's mad scientists, including people at Acquia, Phase II Technologies, and Chapter Three, have been figuring out many ways to endow Drupal websites and services with the benefits of cloud-based hosting -- scalability, affordability, and flexibility. Chapter 3's Josh Koenig presented a great overview entitled, A Match Made in the Cloud – How to Best Take Advantage of Cloud Technologies with Drupal Sites, while Acquia's Barry Jaspan presented an excellent session dealing with the specifics of hosting Drupal on Amazon.

3. Performance: High Speed, Scalable Websites. Speaking of cloud hosting, one of the most innovative initiatives in the Drupal community is the Pantheon Mercury project. Pantheon Mercury is a complete "LAMP" stack whose every component, from Linux, to Apache, to PHP, and of course, Drupal, is optimized for blazing fast speed and scalability. It uses Four Kitchens' Pressflow Drupal to help optimize for scalability and speed. As I mentioned earlier this year, when I gave the Pantheon AMI a test drive on my Amazon eC2 account, it is indeed ridiculously fast. Still looking forward to Chapter Three's public release of Panthon as a service, or as Josh aptly put it in his session, 'Drupal as a Service."

4. Search: Faster and More Powerful Site Search For Drupal Websites. Drupal's native site search is a good out of the box product, but Apache Solr takes search to the next level. Apache Solr is an open source, Java-based, "full text" search application that is fully integrable with Drupal. Apache Solr can be customized to search all kinds of content that exists in a Drupal database, from user profiles, to blog posts, to comments, to basic pages, to attachments -- all from a single search field. It's search results are also highly customizable and sortable. Best of all, it's extremely fast, even when searching huge Drupal websites (try it yourself on whitehouse.gov).

That's probably why the Pantheon project incorporates Apache Solr into its custom LAMP stack. Apache Solr also comes with Acquia's hosting and support services, and with Open Publish, an impressive installation of Drupal for newspapers. Sessions like Apache Solr Search Mastery, and an interesting session demonstratinghow to use Apache Solr to help build a job search site, made it clear that the product has established its niche in the Drupal ecosystem.

5. Administration: Creating, Managing and Updating Lots of Drupal Sites -- From a Single User Interface. One of the most innovative Drupal-as-an-Application projects is Aegir, a customization of Drupal that allows an organization to publish and manage many different kinds of Drupal sites (main site, blog sites, campaign sites, etc), from a single interface. As Aegir's founder demonstrated in his session, Aegir Hosting System - one Drupal to rule them all (Yes -- that is a Tolkien reference!), Aegir could be a very useful tool for larger organizations, such as Universities or large charities, who need program or campaign specific mini-sites, in addition their main website.

No matter what size your organization, Aegir should be help maintain and upgrade your website(s) without writing code or doing shell scripting. This alone could be a big cost-saver for nonprofits. The project looks as though it needs a bit more time to mature, but we're following its progress closely here at Freeflow.

Quite a list -- was anything missing, for nonprofit organizations? It would have been nice to see a session or two focused on integrating Drupal with nonprofit CRMs -- Donor, Volunteer, and Member Management systems. We think for-profit businesses can also benefit from CRM integration with Drupal, so we'll have to work on that for DrupalCon 2011. In the meantime, there is plenty we can take advantage of now to help nonprofits communicate more effectively -- and easily -- with their supporters.

As Tim O'Reilly noted in his DrupalCon keynote (second video), an Open Source projects must meet the needs of not just today's market but tomorrow's as well. The innovation on display at DrupalCon 2010 indicates that Drupal is poised to meet the needs of the real-time, mobile, cloud-app future that many anticipate for the Internet.

For more details on DrupalCon 2010 San Francisco, read Drupal founder's Dries' wrap up post.