northStudio.com can build you a dynamic, interactive website, allowing your visitors a whole new dimension of web experience. We are familiar with a variety of open-source CMS software, but our favorite is the Drupal CMS. These powerful software packages allow you to build a community at your website, attract more visitors, raise more funds, and have a larger overall impact. Depending on the needs of your organization, we'll customize a complete package for your site that will turn it from a dull business card into a dynamic, living entity.
At northstudio.com we specialize in Drupal development, Module development and custom application development using Drupal. We have a full team of Drupal developers, leaders in the community of Drupal development.
We have developed many Drupal projects over the years and also have online demos available. If you would like to view an online demo, from the comfort of your home or office, or would like to come into our office, please fill out our simple contact form and we will walk you through it. Click here for our Drupal CMS Demo Request Form
Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites, including:
* community web portals and discussion sites
* corporate web sites/intranet portals
* personal web sites
* aficionado sites
* e-commerce applications
* resource directories
Drupal includes features to enable
* content management systems
* blogs
* collaborative authoring environments
* forums
* newsletters
* picture galleries
* file uploads and download
and much more.
Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use. If you like what Drupal can do for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your needs.
IBM on Drupal 
Authors:
Alister Lewis-Bowen: Senior Software Engineer, IBM
Stephen Evanchik: Software Engineer, IBM
Louis Weitzman: Senior Software Engineer, IBM
Decision to use Drupal
Because we needed to make this Web site design easy for ourselves and anyone adopting the solution, the ease of installing the framework and the time it would take to figure out how to use it was a key factor. While Ruby on Rails (ROR) was intriguing, we decided that too much time would be spent writing a CMS from scratch, so ROR was dropped from our consideration.
If we were to be able to effectively control access to the information for each persona, having robust and flexible session and user management would make our implementation easier. Of course, the speed of implementation would also be improved by having a robust pluggable infrastructure backed up with a vibrant community contributing quality extensions to the existing framework.
Another key aspect was the potential to ramp up the scalability as the number of concurrent users started to increase.
The ease of adjusting the way the content was displayed was crucial; we needed to remain flexible during iterations of the design and any future adjustments. This so-called "themability" also was required for using the current best practices of Web design with respect to semantic xHTML, CSS, and accessible design.
Figure 1 shows a comparison of how the candidates met our requirements. It was obvious that we needed something more than the blog engines could provide.
Figure1
Mambo was very appealing from the ease of install and the UI, but the development track at the time was fractured and didn't give us any confidence of support.
Typo3 seemed to have a huge community and the maturity we were looking for. However, the learning curve for using Typo3 is daunting in comparison to Drupal.
We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we'll revisit these and any new entries in the field.
Google on Drupal
Google Summer of Code™
The Google Summer of Code is Google's program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development.
Drupal is a popular and well respected web application framework and content management system written in PHP. Famous for its extensible architecture, high quality code, and vibrant community, Drupal is becoming the #1 choice for Web 2.0 sites based on LAMP technologies. The Drupal community has been preparing for Summer of Code 2006, and we are happy to offer the unique proposition that every student we accept into the program will have two dedicated mentors to work with. Summer of Code 2005 was a stunning success for Drupal and we look forward to building on that success in 2005. We look forward to your application. The latest version of Drupal, 4.7.0, has been released on May 1! There has never been a more exciting time than the present to become involved with Drupal.
The Victoria School of Business and Technology (VSBT) 
