It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems

In the summer of 2003, we worked on creating a general description of Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--for the "About Drupal" page on drupal.org. While Drupal is clearly within the class of applications known as content management systems, we felt that to describe it with that term alone would not present a clear picture of the breadth and range of Drupal's capabilities. Thus, the final description ended up describing Drupal with a total of four characteristics, although notably not distinct: • content management • weblog • discussion-based community software • collaboration Why is it then that the term CMS alone would not suffice? The word "content" places much emphasis on the product over process; it fails to emphasize the social use of CMS's, a mislabeling which places too much emphasis on the content itself at the expense of the communication and collaboration the better of these systems implement. In order to better understand how CMS's are being influenced by the precepts of social software and their role in creating social networks online, this presentation will • explore Drupal's social software features, • narrate its genesis as software serving a community • explain the influence of the community itself on Drupal development and the software's influence on the community that creates and uses it. In composing this text, we draw on the coauthors' unique perspectives. One of us is the founder and lead developer of Drupal, and the other a researcher in Computers and Writing and a participant in the Drupal community.