I've planned to write this article for quite a while, not to profess my love for Drupal, the open source PHP-based web content management system, but to discuss some of Drupal’s weaknesses and scenarios where Drupal isn’t the best fit. Many of these ideas are relevant to other open source and vendor web content solutions as well.

Because there’s a lot to talk about, this is the first in a 3-part series.

Most of my colleagues know that I'm a big proponent of open source software and particularly of Drupal. I started freelancing and building sites with Drupal during the early days of Drupal 5 and have found it to be a great platform for building content-managed sites in many cases. Fast forward 4 years and we at CapTech are running large scale, enterprise projects implementing Drupal.

Also exciting, over the past year or so, Drupal has started to gain more popularity among the "independent" analysts, seeing frequent mentions from Gartner and Forrester.

Recently I oversaw an internal development effort to integrate Vivisimo's Velocity search engine into Microsoft SharePoint and JBoss Portal.  CapTech has experience with several search products and many have the same integration challenges.  We found that Velocity's architecture simplifies or eliminates many of these challenges.  Here are just a few great features that we leveraged in this project.

After being involved with recent Alfresco-based enterprise portals, Iʼve begun reflecting on best practices in regards to integration with the popular open-source CMS.  This article describes some learnings on integrating Alfrescoʼs Document Management (DM) and Web Content Management (WCM) repositories with an enterprise portal.