Harold and Cameron's review of Drupal for Rick Bruner's blog is now up. It's a long review, fitting into the question-and-answer format that Rick requested. It's quite comprehensive, but I think they missed a couple of things, so I'm going to clarify here. And in case it doesn't come through, thanks for doing the review, and especially thanks for mentioning Bryght!

Of course, I have to evangelize Drupal, seeing as how I'm running a business around it, but I actually think we as a community have not done enough to sing its praises. In part, being very developer-centric, we know we can do better (and that better is coming), so perhaps that is part of the issue -- the next bigger best feature is just another dot release away.

In general Harold and Cameron answered "What's the killer feature, if there is one?" pretty well, but I would add that it supports many different types of content as a first class citizen, from events to images to weblinks (to whatever you can dream up with flexinode).

Drupal's taxonomy/categorization features also kick ass. Perhaps the advanced usages are only an ontologist's dream, but they certainly allow for a lot of features by just creating different vocabularies to organize content: e.g. build a business directory by coming up with one or more vocabularies and then using weblink, blog, or flexinode types for the base entries.

And aggregation, which certainly didn't come out strongly enough. Being able to aggregate feeds out of the box is a feature that I don't believe is found in any other platform out of the box. As well, the way it is implemented in Drupal, with the ability to categorize feeds and then join them into bundles, is something that's hard to do on a desktop aggregator, never mind a web-based one.

Did I mention the book module? A way to gather together any of the content types supported by Drupal into an ordered book. Which also happens to solve the problem of transient categories -- rather than creating a "Mexico 2004" category that only gets used for X posts, just use the "Travel" category for the main posts, but then have a book called "Mexico 2004" with all the blog posts and images (and images and weblinks and...) ordered as you want them. Hmmm...makes me think adding per-book RSS feeds might be an interesting feature to add.

And getting to the end of the article, a lot of these things should be filed under "Does it pioneer any other new blog features that other platforms don't have?" as well.

What features does it lack or need fixing?

By default, Drupal has no easy tagging or WYSIWYG features; they must be installed by module so you can tell they are an accessory, not part of the core of the system.

Hmmm..it's not clear to me that this is something lacking or that needs fixing. HTMLArea has been around for quite some time, which allows for full WYSIWYG, including drag-and-drop from other web pages and easy image uploading/insertion. This module has only gotten better for 4.5: it now supports uploading of any document from within it's friendly interface, plus you can define your own HTML tags which can then be accessed through the GUI buttons.

Sure it's an "add on module", but the same is true for WordPress's or MovableType's plug-in architectures.

I have the same issue with the phrase that is used twice: "but there is no easy way to upload a file (image, pdf...) with a post". Yes, these things require extra modules, but those features certainly are there.

What needs fixing? Well, again, lots of things -- because I want to see the Drupal platform be absolutely awesome. My number one goal is usability: making all these incredible features easier to use, to better showcase the complexity that is possible with a standard Drupal install.

Is there a built-in Blogroll/Link List kind of feature to manage blogrolls?

There is no built-in blogroll feature, but some workarounds are available on the developer forum. Not easy at this time. Drupal allows posting by XML-RPC blog APIs.

Of course there is a built-in "blogroll" feature! There are at least two ways to accomplish this. One is to use weblink -- make a category called "blogroll" and tag the links of those you read, including notification when updated. The second is the aggregator. Add all the feeds you consider to be on your blogroll, tag them with something specific (like, say, blogroll). Then you can enable the "blogroll" block and display it wherever you link. And, of course, the aggregator generates an OPML file of your subscriptions, too.

The "other" way to have a blogroll is to create a custom block and cut-and-paste some javascript from the many external sites that offer this...which defeats the purpose (link promotion) of blogrolls in the first place, since search engines won't follow those javascript links.

(Can you tell blogrolls bug me? I don't like the term, and I don't like the concept. If I like what I read on your site, I'll link/excerpt posts directly.)

The answer to whether or not photo galleries are supported was not satisfactory to me. Again, image module absolutely does this. I'll be the first to say that the implementation of photo galleries isn't that great compared to Gallery or Flickr, but those are two applications fanatically focused on pictures. Drupal's community features mean that every single member can have the ability to have their own photo gallery -- as well as a site-wide gallery. Plus, the ability to categorize pictures in multiple categories, but of course only show up once.

Does it support multiple authors? If so, does it have decent permission controls? (E.g., can you limit authors to publish only to draft?)

Drupal supports multiple authors, but they each get a separate blog, so it won't look like a group blog. There is a meta blog of all bloggers on a site. There is a wide range of permissions that the admin can control; this is more usually used for the content management sections of a drupal site, not the blog sections.

Well, individual blogs is one way to do this. Another way to do this is to use the "story" node type and allow multiple people to post to it (more group blog like, and each author could also have their own blog on the site as well, for shorter posts or stuff that's not necessarily "front page news"). Using the submission queue, you can hold content for approval. Multiple author, community-level features are another of Drupal's strengths -- let's highlight this: the answers to this question are "yes" and yes"!

OK, that's probably enough Drupal flag waving for now. Can you tell that I like the system? And I haven't even started talking about some of the amazing new stuff that's coming in 4.5 and beyond. Drupal cheerleader, over and out.