Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, and Oscommerce. Oh My!

Steve Borsch over at Connecting the Dots has put together an extensive look at a common challenge faced by companies trying to pick a platform (or platforms) for their online businesses. His example looks at the challenge of building a site using open source solutions for content management, blogging, forums, and ecommerce. In the example, he suggests Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, and OSCommerce to cover each of the needs, but then gets to the heart of his annoyance:

Web 2.0 and Internet-as-a-Platform: It's still WAY too hard

"But here's where it got HUGELY challenging and he had to keep reminding himself, "OK...you're a grown man. Do not cry." He looked at each of the administration interfaces for these various offerings and realized that the incredibly steep learning curve for his people would be required on EACH OF THE PACKAGES! Integrating all of these very different open source offerings would be prohibitively expensive (AND UNLIKELY TO EVER LOOK LIKE ONE, ORCHESTRATED AND COORDINATED SITE) and none of the firms even had a clue on how to do it. "Just train all of your people on the different packages" some said. Others recommended hiring a permanent systems administrator who could run them all. The more he looked into this as an option, the more he realized that his thoughts around a $25-$35k budget to build and deliver this Web asset was laughingly small. He couldn't even find a part time, 20 hour per week admin for the whole budget amount!"

Getting those four separate open source projects to unite into one clean user interface on both the front and back ends would be a monumental task today. And beyond the administration time involved in running such a site, what about the resources needed to actually create and maintain content on a CMS, blog, forum, and online store? I hope Borsh's mythical friend is budgeting for that so he doesn't end up with an impressive, yet empty, web based business platform.

I'm not entirely sure the above applications really need to be integrated. Sure, it would make life easier in some ways, such as consistency in site look & feel, but I don't think it's the end of the world if that's not the case. For example, if Technology Evangelist decided to start selling t-shirts tomorrow, we could set up an ecommerce section of this site using oscommerce, skin it to look something like the rest of this site, and start receiving orders. The orders and inventory additions would likely be handled by someone other than myself, so this other person would become the master of that application. Or, we could set up a 3rd party ecommerce site like Cafe Press to handle our t-shirt sales. That certainly wouldn't look like the rest of our site, but we'd still be able to fulfill orders.

Looking into my crystal ball, if the evolution of open source web apps caused any of these four to merge, leading to a super-platform closer to what Borsch describes, I'd expect the base code to be Drupal, with oscommerce, phpBB, and Wordpress integrations. Drupal seems like the most flexible CMS system, a little lightweight compared to Wordpress for blogging out of the box, and certainly isn't an ecommerce solution by default, but starting with, or moving to a Drupal based integrated platform seems like the most logical fit to me.

Ed, good point when you raise the question "what about the resources needed to actually create and maintain content?"....

yes, isn't it amazing how that part often gets overlooked? hello? -- that's what will really define the brand and be much more likely to differentiate the business...

Have you considered that using open source though free on the front end is sometimes much more costly than using a fee based platform. Obviously I'm a little self serving because I represent a shopping cart platform at WebCart.net but we've found that a number of people found osCommerce to expensive to manage as compared to our comprehensive ecommerce solution.

Jason...you have a good point. I've never found open sourse to be cheaper. Yes, if you can live with the initial install & you know how to do it yourself, maybe. Beyond that, not a chance. Can anyone name more than 5-10 open source programs that are original, not a copy of something that aready exists, and successful? And something you'd bet your company/livlyhood on? Leave out Apache, MySQL, and RedHat Linux?
As my old buddy Graeme mentioned in an email, everything else seems to be built on open source fragments with proprietary programming and guarantees built on top...RedHat, OSX, etc.
In this discussion, osCommerce is a good example. It's old, convoluted code. There is now nothing "modern" about it. If you want to live in 2001-03, osCommerce is your baby. These things need to be dump'd, it's 2007.

TYPO3 has the anticipated learning curve, but it is worth the effort. If it can be stored, in can be displayed exceedingly well. Drupal, while nice, doesn't compare well with the mostly European effort of the TYPO3 team.

Drupal alone can handle everything that the tech evangelist desires from all four of these packages.

Creating and maintaining web sites is never free. But it is amazing how much functionality you get for the money now and how organizations and businesses can take advantage of Web 2.0 (if they are thoughtful about it and not just doing to it to be trendy). Most of this amazing value/functionality is coming out of and being driven by the open source community.

Open source or not, an org or a .com needs to hire a firm. Regarding which consultants to hire? I'd rather go with those using open source because they litterally have an army of people behind them. The programmers at the firm may have written a module or two that they've contributed back to Drupal, but they have access to literally hundreds of, mostly high quality, modules that others have created.

The consultants who promote the proprietary packages have to grovel to Microsoft or whomever and essentially be salesmen for their products. They also have to sit around and wait for someone else to add functionality that their clients are begging for. The Drupal folk don't have to wait for anybody. They go to the forums and see who has already done it -- or just do it themselves if it is totally new. And then they have this huge user group among whom many will test the new module in real life situations.

There is nothing "crunchy granola" about Drupal or other open source products. It is about the smartest business strategy in a changing Internet and changing economy.

Open Source isn't about "free". It's about whether you want the people you pay to be part of a larger collaborative community unhindered by the priorities and strategic decisions of big business.

With Shai's comment, working on integration of several independent open source systems may be better fulfilled by integrating Drupal modules of same functions.

From here, I just moved to a concern of "how to differentiate a web site" if I choose and depend on Drupal system.

1. Shall we be able to insert and integrate our javascript, PHP, or mySQL codes into Drupal's code?
(As I heard Drupal is not designed in MVC and OOP, which I am not very sure if it's true or not.)

2. Whatsoever, if there is a good possibility to insert and integrate codes into Drupal, what (level of) abilities should we be prepared to have/hire?
(Such as ability to develop modules?)

I don't know why you'd need to integrate the four. With Drupal you can do the combined functions of the other three plus some. For ecommerce, check out Ubercart. With less work than a four-way integration you can make the blogging experience similar to Wordpress, and the forum experience similar to phpBB. More effort up front in the development and planning phase will save the very badly advised attempt at integration.

@richard #7: It is true that Drupal doesn't used object oriented code, but it has the separation of concerns that people are looking for in MVC. There are ample integration points for every task, and writing extension modules is both straightforward and powerful. You can, for example, modify any form that that your Drupal site has from within a custom module, without hacking core Drupal or its other contributed modules. The non-OO aspect of Drupal is less horrifying than most programmers would assume because many of the facets of OO are built into the architecture in clean and efficient ways.

Here's the meat of the matter: Drupal, Typo3 and expression engine (which are the ones mentioned so far) are platforms for complete solutions. phpBB, Wordpress and OSCommerce are highly focused leaders in vertical segments. Start any analysis from this perspective and you will come to different (and more productive) conclusions.

Comments

1. Posted by: PXLated on May 14, 2007 10:53 AM:

The nice thing about integration is your visitors/customers have just one username/password across the various modules. It's the membership modules of these disparate apps that present a real challenge and one reason (among many) they won't ever be integrated. And, most of the packages mentioned are not the cleanest of code, don't totally seperate content and presentation, and each have their own security issues that need to be dealt with separately. It's pretty much a mish mash crap shoot. The only package I know that unifies all these parts cleanly with a unified membership module is ExpressionEngine. It's currently light weight on the eCommerce part but a full commerce module is in the works. It's not open source but you do get the source. It also has the best security record of the bunch.

Now, to Steve's mythical Joe. Steve uses a $25-35K budget figure. To date, even though I could set up 90-95% of Joes requirements in ExpressionEngine with no custom php development for the low end of that range (probably less depending on the details), I haven't found an average Joe that even has that budget, or in most cases, anything close.

If you know where those Joes are hangin out, send them my way :-)

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