Irakli:

Earlier this year, Phase2 launched a feature-rich, turn-key, semantically empowered publishing platform, OpenPublish. Open Publish leverages a set of modules called the Calais Collection which we developed and released in partnership with Thomson Reuters.

Today Phase2 announced our second turn-key open-source solution: Tattler (app), a topic monitoring tool for the Web. Despite the somewhat sarcastic name (yes, we had fun with it), Tattler is all about transparency and doing cool things with the aggregation of information available on the web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics you ask it to monitor. Using Semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to your organization. Like OpenPublish, Tattler leverages the Calais Collection and other APIs to enrich the data collected.

Both of the solutions are 100% open-source, built on top of Drupal and released under the General Public License (GPL). We are often asked why we are releasing such valuable, powerful solutions for free into the open-source community. It’s a valid question and I would like to take this opportunity to address this question as well as share some of our vision for the future of the Professional Open Source model.

This is not intended to be a marketing pitch. But we do want to tell you where Phase2 is headed with the Professional Open Source model, by developing and releasing powerful turn-key solutions for free. We hope the story of our experience will also be useful for other open-source companies considering the same path.

Drupal as a Development Platform

We’ve been developing web-solutions with Drupal for many years now, and with open-source tools in general, since Phase2 was founded in 2001. Over the course of this work, we have gotten intimately familiar with the needs of organizations both large and small and in a variety of industries. There were several striking similarities that kept coming up in our client work:

• Drupal is a very flexible open-source platform.
• Most organizations have neither the time nor the resources to build custom systems.

• End-users need total solutions, not just tools they have to piece together themselves.

The reason why Drupal has become so popular is because it’s an outstanding development platform, not just a content-management system. To be quite honest, and with the danger of upsetting some Drupal zealots, if all you need is a bare-bones CMS or a blogging software, Drupal may not be the best choice. Perhaps you should be looking at WordPress instead? Drupal is popular because of its extensibility. You can mold Drupal the exact way you need and do so in a scalable, maintainable way, without hacking code or producing the “spaghetti code” that PHP had, unfortunately become known for.

The Story of Installation Profiles

Why is the nature of Drupal’s development platform important? Because business is much more demanding and fast-paced than it used to be. A bare-bones CMS is not enough. Putting together a solid website is much more than downloading Drupal core, adding modules, dumping a theme on top and declaring victory. At the same time, minimizing the customization effort is crucial: the project deadlines are getting increasingly tighter and so are budgets. Whoever figures out how to close the gap, will be in the lead for the next phase of “CMS wars”.

Drupal started closing that gap a while ago. In Drupal 5.x series, the concept of “Installation Profiles” was introduced. Installation Profile allows developers to produce a Drupal installer that is packaged differently from the standard one. You can include extra modules, you can include custom themes, do advanced configuration during the installation, set up default values and more. There are a number of installation profiles that have been developed since the feature was introduced.

We saw a clear opportunity with installation profiles to make turn key solutions that were easily repeatable. Even though each client is inherently different, there are still some parallels that make sense. For instance, a lot of online publications have similar needs with regards to content types, views, modules, etc. Granted each setup will likely require further customization, but there’s no reason why we should keep manually bootstrapping the development process and waste hundreds of hours worth of work starting from core.

It was clear: we needed an installation profile like OpenPublish and that others would use it too.

OpenPublish is just one example, however. Another great example is an e-commerce website installation profile. Setting one up, in Drupal, is a complex and tedious process which can take a lot of effort and time, even though all the modules are available on drupal.org. However, if you start with the UberDrupal installation profile – it only takes a couple of minutes. UberDrupal was developed by Commerce Guys, likely under the same premises and has grown to become the tool of choice for Drupal e-Commerce because most organizations cannot make a case to dedicate the resources or expertise to re-invent a wheel that has been built.

Why Give It Away?

There are probably many reasons to give good code away these days, but still many people wonder: Could we have kept the installation profiles hidden and used it for “competitive advantage”, instead of releasing it as open-source? For all legal (even with GPL) and technical purposes – yes we could have. Or we could have written an independent setup script, that does not link with Drupal, hence is not covered by GPL and can be commercial. But there are 3 main reasons why we did not.

• It is built on Drupal, which has a community we respect and trust. When we are talking about installation profile as a turn-key solution – as custom Drupal deployment – we really mean the entire bundle. The components of the bundle are always developed by numerous contributors. In the end – it’s the power of the community, the open-source way of joint development that makes these bundles a reality.

• These efforts are too large to be undertaken alone. We can get a better result from larger participation. Closing down, shutting out and not allowing the community to see and/or contribute to the effort is the last thing you want to do. On the contrary – the bundle will be so much more powerful, sustainable and full of innovation if it gets a lot of visibility.

• By releasing the platform, we are free to focus on innovations, enhancements, custom implementations and other fun stuff. This creates work of the variety we like to do.

The Credibility of Professional Open Source As a Business Model

Unfortunately, Drupal Installation Profiles have not gotten the credit they deserve. There are not many of them, and few are actively maintained and developed. You can see a lot of profiles that have not gotten a code released for months and others have been abandoned altogether. We think this is because a bundle is very much like a product, but they are not usually treated as such. It needs to be professionally managed and maintained. Also, bundles do not, yet, get nearly as much attention from the community as the core Drupal distribution does, hence they need more hand-holding and more attention from a dedicated maintainer.

To be successful, an installation profile needs a professional company, or companies, behind it that lead the community and can guarantee the credibility of the project by providing professional services, and peace of mind for the “enterprise”-level adoption. Much like Acquia has boosted the credibility of Drupal, a professional company standing by an installation profile can make it ready for serious business.

Our friends at DevelopmentSeed are also experts at this model. Recently, they announced a very promising, bundled Drupal distribution: OpenAtrium which pursues the same ideology: a custom Drupal install serving a well-defined, niche need: internal organizational communications.

We hope to see more players in this field. It does a lot of good for the community at large.

Final Words.

When I started this post, I had envisioned a short, mission message to explain my new role as Director of Product Development for Phase2 to our employees, friends, partners, clients and the members of the community. However, it ended up becoming my longest blog post, to date. I hope it shed some light on what we are trying to accomplish with Tattler, OpenPublish and other products we intend to release in the future. We will try to share our lessons learned and success stories of this effort, as we move along, in the hopes of encouraging other companies to also adopt the “Professional Open Source” model and take Drupal, and commercial open-source to the next level.

These are remarkable times for open source. The enormous support and encouragement of organizations across the full spectrum of industries and now even from the government is unprecedented. As exciting as this support is, it also puts pressure on everybody in the community to make sure we are ready for the responsibility. This is the time to prove that open-source is a serious business model, it is professionally developed and managed and every bit as reliable as commercial alternatives.

We believe that open source is ready for the challenge. It’s what the new “products” division at Phase2 is all about.