Constitutional Law

A Talk with the Creator of Drupal

By J.D. Lasica

Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay.com) and a host of citizen media sites.

The other night I had dinner with Dries Buytaert, the self-effacing founder and creator of Drupal. Buytaert chiefly credits the tens of thousands of volunteer programmers who contributed to the platform's code base over the years. (Ourmedia is about to relaunch on Drupal 6; here's our beta site.)

In this 11-minute interview, Buytaert talks about Drupal over the years, the power of open source publishing, and a new partnership with Acquia, a Boston-area company that gives citizen publishers a free publishing platform and tech support to get it up and running. It's an important development in the evolution of Drupal from geeky boy toy to mature CMS.

Watch video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia (at full 480 pixels wide)
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on October 08, 2008 (boomark / email).