4 ms·

Twitter chooses Drupal for their official blog

18 points by timmillwood 13y ago

danso 13y ago
Not such a big 'whoa' considering they already use Drupal for their dev site, though I guess I care more about the dev site than their blog. But why use Drupal for just a blog?
- zdw 13y ago
  Drupal has a decent caching layer, a lot of useful plugins, and is actively developed. As someone who does a fair bit of Drupal dev, for this use case (high volume, low number of changes) I probably would have picked a static site generator, but that's just me...
- weego 13y ago
  They were recruiting Drupal people not so long ago and it mentioned that it was to work on a fairly heavily modified Drupal install, so if you have the workflow in place internally to use it in one situation it makes sense to re-use that workflow and investment for any suitable situation.
TomGullen 13y ago
I don't really understand why Twitter would use another solution, blogs are pretty simple things fundamentally, don't they want total control over it? I'm sure they have the resources.
- kitcar 13y ago
  There isn't always a need to reinvent the wheel, even if you have the resources to do so; in this case Twitter isn't trying to compete on the technical functionality of their blog - therefore it doesn't make business sense for them to over-invest resources into it - they are therefore effectively outsourcing it (the technology side, at least).
EGreg 13y ago
OK so they chose Drupal. What's the big deal, it's a nice platform for developers to use. Not super user friendly, but Twitter is full of developers who can tweak it. Why is this news?
- ritonlajoie 13y ago
  It's news because Twitter will probably contribute to the Drupal project.
caniszczyk 13y ago
Yes, it's the open source content management system (with a very large community and set of plug-ins) we decided to standardize on a variety of our public facing sites: dev.twitter.com, blog.twitter.com/company, business.twitter.com, etc...
rjknight 13y ago
I thought Twitter had a fairly decent in-house blogging platform... https://posterous.com/bye.html https://posterous.com/bye.html
blainsmith 13y ago
It will be interesting to start hearing "well Twitter uses Drupal" when marketing people are trying to make a point that Drupal will solve all their website problems when in reality it may be overkill for their needs.
- caniszczyk 13y ago
  See this blog post: http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal
timkeller 13y ago
Twitter has been using Drupal for some time at https://dev.twitter.com https://dev.twitter.com. Source: http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal
alekseyk 13y ago
I just pictured somebody at Twitter suggesting that they use Tumblr and getting death stares from everybody in the room.
beebs93 13y ago
I'm not too surprised they didn't chose WordPress - especially given the recent high risk vulnerabilities in popular WordPress plugins. Drupal still seems like a massive sledgehammer for a small nail when it comes things like simple blogs. I just loathe the flawed "Well the White House uses it so..."-like logic that we hear from clients.

18 points by timmillwood 13y ago

danso 13y ago

Not such a big 'whoa' considering they already use Drupal for their dev site, though I guess I care more about the dev site than their blog. But why use Drupal for just a blog?

zdw 13y ago
Drupal has a decent caching layer, a lot of useful plugins, and is actively developed. As someone who does a fair bit of Drupal dev, for this use case (high volume, low number of changes) I probably would have picked a static site generator, but that's just me...
weego 13y ago
They were recruiting Drupal people not so long ago and it mentioned that it was to work on a fairly heavily modified Drupal install, so if you have the workflow in place internally to use it in one situation it makes sense to re-use that workflow and investment for any suitable situation.

TomGullen 13y ago

I don't really understand why Twitter would use another solution, blogs are pretty simple things fundamentally, don't they want total control over it? I'm sure they have the resources.

kitcar 13y ago
There isn't always a need to reinvent the wheel, even if you have the resources to do so; in this case Twitter isn't trying to compete on the technical functionality of their blog - therefore it doesn't make business sense for them to over-invest resources into it - they are therefore effectively outsourcing it (the technology side, at least).

EGreg 13y ago

OK so they chose Drupal. What's the big deal, it's a nice platform for developers to use. Not super user friendly, but Twitter is full of developers who can tweak it. Why is this news?

ritonlajoie 13y ago
It's news because Twitter will probably contribute to the Drupal project.

caniszczyk 13y ago

Yes, it's the open source content management system (with a very large community and set of plug-ins) we decided to standardize on a variety of our public facing sites: dev.twitter.com, blog.twitter.com/company, business.twitter.com, etc...

rjknight 13y ago

I thought Twitter had a fairly decent in-house blogging platform... https://posterous.com/bye.html https://posterous.com/bye.html

blainsmith 13y ago

It will be interesting to start hearing "well Twitter uses Drupal" when marketing people are trying to make a point that Drupal will solve all their website problems when in reality it may be overkill for their needs.

caniszczyk 13y ago
See this blog post: http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal

timkeller 13y ago

Twitter has been using Drupal for some time at https://dev.twitter.com https://dev.twitter.com. Source: http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal

alekseyk 13y ago

I just pictured somebody at Twitter suggesting that they use Tumblr and getting death stares from everybody in the room.

beebs93 13y ago

I'm not too surprised they didn't chose WordPress - especially given the recent high risk vulnerabilities in popular WordPress plugins. Drupal still seems like a massive sledgehammer for a small nail when it comes things like simple blogs. I just loathe the flawed "Well the White House uses it so..."-like logic that we hear from clients.