Webvisions 07 - Must Have Open source Apps

Brian Jamison's Must Have Apps consist of Trac, Drupal and an as yet unnamed Ruby on Rails ecommerce app.

Trac is an Open-Source project management system that also provides an interface for the Subversion, version control system. We don't use Trac ourselves but it comes highly recommended from the community at large.

Unfuddle is the paid alternative we're familiar with.

The Drupal CMS is quite familiar to us at Raincity, but the session-goers seemed quite interested in the possibilities it has to offer.

Drupal is a PHP-based, open-source content management system with a robust developer community and rafts of contributed modules (nearly all free) that can be used to extend your site's functionality.

Drupal simply needs PHP support and a PostGre or MySQL database to run. Installation from version 5 onward is ridiculously simple.

Discussion drifted towards the common Drupal/Joomla debate, Jamison himself described Joomla as suitable for "Advanced Amateurs," where Drupal is the professional solution. I don't have a lot of first-hand experience with Joomla, but having been at the OSCMS Summit in Sunnyvale recently, I can confirm that about 20% of the talk was on Joomla and the rest of the attention was squarely placed on Drupal.

Brief mention of the Ruby on Rails CMS Radiant was made, but the developer community for it is still in its infancy compared to the other CMSs mentioned.

Jamison continued praising Drupal, citing it as an all-around tool that he used to deliver Web 2.0 style functionality such as Google Maps mash-ups for clients very rapidly. I'd have to agree.

The last item Jamison covered was an as yet unnamed Ruby on Rails based ecommerce app. This app was obviously still in development but showed potential. At least the development philosophy seemed right - clean code, CSS for presentation, minimal AJAX. Let the clients decide how they want to configure things.

BTW, Brian's company OpenSourcery is looking to hire Rails wizards. Contact them if you have the right foo.