March 27, 2008

Pirillo Starts Large Scale Community CMS Project

Duncan Riley

67 comments »

Chris Pirillo has announced a new, large scale open source CMS project that aims to “de-geekify” website tools (announcement video above).

The project will be built on the open source Drupal framework:

“For the geeks: Drupal has so much power in its core, and enough fantastic community-contributed modules, that I think it’s time to assemble an Install Profile, complete with beautiful (accessible, microformat’ed, high quality) themes, pre-set Views for any Web community to either install on their own or have hosted at any given Web host that supports Drupal with optimizations. The benefits to you should be more than obvious….And I don’t mean just the framework for the community platform, I mean… like, it’s ready to go. “It’s not the features, it’s the implementation.”

I chatted with Pirillo after the announcement. What he’s looking to achieve is delivering a multi-faceted, open source, easy to use end CMS. To break that down further: imagine installing a package on your web host that immediately delivered Digg style functionality, or photo sharing, a community forum, a blog, a social network ala Facebook, or even a clone of the growing number of FriendFeed style sites, or a combination of all or any of them. Here’s the important difference to existing solutions: imagine that you wouldn’t have to touch a piece of code to activate the various aspects. Imagine that a color change made in one module automatically applies across all module or as specified, without the need (again) to touch code.

The project would also be committed to best practice in DataPortability with OpenID, OAuth and even support for OpenSocial:

The bottom line is freedom and flexibility - the freedom to choose, the freedom to grow, the freedom to leave (and take your profile data with you, or easily transfer it to another system). The flexibility to add features that pivot around the user or groups of users - whatever new tool may come along.

Pirillo is committed to building the community and project completely open source and without undue influence or commercial constraint, although he is willing to talk to potential partners.

Adam Kalsey has been assembling the project and Pirillo is looking for those interested to explore the idea some more and even come on board. A first release of an activity stream for Drupal is available here. It’s a noble idea with a perhaps insanely wide scope, but as Chris idealistically said to me tonight: “The deliverables must be realistic, but if you’re going to dream - dream big, and make sure the world benefits.”

See our coverage of Crowd Fusion, another upcoming CMS system, being built by former Weblogs, Inc. cofounder Brian Alvey.

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Pirillo Open Source CMS Project

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Der Blogbote

March 27th, 2008 at 3:18 am

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Comments

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Dave Johnston

March 27th, 2008 at 2:12 am

Dream big…why not?

I just want all these things added to WordPress.
Michael Arrington

March 27th, 2008 at 2:16 am

this thing have a name?
Chris Pirillo

March 27th, 2008 at 2:27 am

It’s been dubbed the ‘Community Participation Platform’ by a few Drupal folks, and here’s the open Assembla site for it:

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/drupalcpp

That’s just a working name for the project. I’m sure when it’s ready and assembled, we’ll have figured out what to call it.
yongfook

March 27th, 2008 at 2:28 am

I simply cannot watch this guy without wanting to violently headbutt my screen.

Techcrunch, you owe me a new iMac.
Jonny Dover

March 27th, 2008 at 2:40 am

I think he’s trying to do an Ubuntu for Content Management. It’s got the same ‘noble idea’ quality, it’s trying to take something that’s already powerful and make it easy without fiddling with programming or config files.

Here’s the rest of what I was thinking:
http://jonny-dover.newsvine.co.....management
Cangelor - The China Angel Investor

March 27th, 2008 at 2:41 am

This would be strongly welcomed. Since Web 1.0, several popular open source PHP forums packages have been widely used to build many online communities through which many first-time Internet users know what is an online community. Now in Web 2.0, we do need a new open source PHP package that can clone all the features of the most popular Web 2.0 toys like digg.com, youtube.com, facebook.com, etc. so an average webmaster can easily setup a full-featured Web 2.0 online community without any technical or financial problems.

Anyway, it’s a big dream while hard work is expected as well.
Josef Assad

March 27th, 2008 at 2:41 am

So this to drupal is like ubuntu to debian, hm?
Jonny Dover

March 27th, 2008 at 2:46 am

Josef–
It’s pretty similar, except that Pirillo’s asking for someone for his Canonical right now.
Michael Arrington

March 27th, 2008 at 2:54 am

Chris Pirillo - wow, that’s, um, catchy.

Too bad “gnome” is already taken.
Don Wilson

March 27th, 2008 at 3:08 am

I’ll pass.
Andy Gongea

March 27th, 2008 at 3:21 am

Same here. I’ll pass.

People want something customized on their needs - those who stick to the minimal open source are people with no imagination.

Open source rocks. But custom made frameworks rules.
Technicle

March 27th, 2008 at 3:22 am

@9

Too bad “gnome” is already taken.

ynome is available.
Chris Pirillo

March 27th, 2008 at 3:40 am

Fine, fine… whatever. I’ve always fought this, given that Lockergnome.com was around a helluva lot longer than the GNOME project. That said… I just registered:

gnomepal.org

It’s quite fitting - and it even sounds friendly.

It’s kinda funny to read the developer comments, even in this thread. It’s not about being able to roll your own, it’s about NOT BEING ABLE TO ROLL YOUR OWN.
D

March 27th, 2008 at 4:00 am

@4 LMAO !!
John

March 27th, 2008 at 4:08 am

I have to support a lot of Joomla and Drupal websites for my job. All he really can do is make a package manager similar to yum/apt-get. The install profile is a welcome idea. The farthest I can see this going is dynamic layouts with drag and drop containers.
Robin Wauters

March 27th, 2008 at 4:38 am

To my knowledge, Drupal lead dev Dries Buytaert is trying to set up a commercial company based on making ready-made apps with Drupal just like this with http://acquia.com
Strubit

March 27th, 2008 at 4:46 am

No one has truly reinvented content management yet. These systems all still subscribe to old authoring and publishing paradigms that no longer scale for the types of media rich and personalised experiences we’d all like to be developing.

The entire WCMS/ECM landscape is ripe for disruption. Building a movement around an open platform and framework is the expected way. What about building an open platform targeted at the non-technical user? As a tangent argument, YouTube grew because anyone could publish video. Facebook grew because anyone could develop an interconnected socially aware profile. Why can’t i build my own Digg or Twitter using a point and click environment?

The stratey for ‘de-geekifying’ website tools is noble, but how realistic is it when the cause is intrumented by a geek?
alan p

March 27th, 2008 at 5:45 am

@16…did someone say “Commercialise” - surely not!

http://broadstuff.com/archives.....rones.html
Jay Adair

March 27th, 2008 at 5:54 am

Does this guy not want to be very wealthy? If he pulled it off (not sure he can with the time it would take to develop it) then there’ll be a lot of angry site owners who don’t want everyone and their dog to have what they’ve got.
Eric Atkins

March 27th, 2008 at 6:55 am

Drupal is one of the most powerful CMS systems but it’s not very user friendly (for the dev or the visitor) and it doesn’t do just ONE thing well. WordPress does one thing well - that’s blogging. With Drupal, setting a WordPress-live blog is a pain and takes (if you are new to Drupal) hours of time.

However, once you are up and running, your Drupal CMS is very powerful and extendable.

Chris is trying to make Drupal do one thing well, one thing at a time. So, expect the newly formed group to build an install package that’s easy to install and is powerful with extensions and modules ready to go right out of the box.

The community has already written the modules that allow Drupal to build clones of Flickr, DIGG, Reddit, del.icio.us, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The problem is that no one has build a polished package that really make installing those modules easy.
Natasha

March 27th, 2008 at 7:01 am

Joomla Open Source CMS is pretty “ungeeky” as it is. You can create a decent dynamic site not knowing any php.

One issue both with Drupal and Joomla, as well as other OS systems, is they are continuously attacked by hackers.
So, no matter, how ungeeky the system is, there’s got to be a geek around to keep patching it.
John Fuller

March 27th, 2008 at 7:13 am

I agree the scope is insanely wide. The idea seems to be to come up with the perfect content management system. Isn’t that already the goal of Drupal (or any other CMS) to some degree? If they have not been able to achieve that by now, I don’t see how they will achieve that anytime soon (if ever.)

The biggest problem I see with this is that you are taking a bunch of crappy things (Drupal, Open ID, Open Social) mashing them together and expecting something not crappy to come out in the end. Crappy in this case means not user friendly.

Why Drupal? Why not build something from scratch? Why not just use something like Ning? Oh well, good luck.
Anon

March 27th, 2008 at 7:17 am

phpBB (and others) are setup and used by tons of people who would never be able to make their own bulletin board. If this can do something similar for other services it will be a sea-change.
Derek

March 27th, 2008 at 7:31 am

“there’ll be a lot of angry site owners who don’t want everyone and their dog to have what they’ve got.”

Then those smart people who bult Digg, Twitter, Wikipedia, Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc… will have to go and develop something new, that everyday people can’t code up in a couple months. It’s the natural cycle. They’ve shown us what features and functions work, now we emulate them in our own products.

It think it’s a good idea. It’s not going to put much of a dent in the big players pockets, but for the people out there who actually know how to install & manage something like Wordpress or Drupal and are not programmers, this could be the greatest thing ever for them.
Good News

March 27th, 2008 at 7:34 am

It’s about darn time!

Geeks like us tend to get hooked on code intricacies and the power of the back end, and we tend to forget the end user who just learned about right-clicking on a web page.

Generating a UI that’s as easy to use as the app is powerful is Apple’s secret sauce for a $127 Billion company (ya, that’s really their current market cap - wow).

And that’s also what put Google where it is (currently $140 Billion market cap)… Their focus is always on the end user, while simultaneously worshiping their engineers.

It’s about time the Open Source community (aside from some very good exceptions like Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) follows suit. It’s the only way to get broader adoption, after all.

And, coincidentally, those exceptions Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. are the open source projects that HAVE been broadly adopted.
bloggo

March 27th, 2008 at 8:01 am

It *has* to be open source if he’s using gpl-governed Drupal, if he intends to distribute it to people. Any distribution forces the “owner” to open source the code.
Robert Sanzalone

March 27th, 2008 at 8:19 am

I smell the good buddies up I-5 may have had a hand in convincing Drupal may be the best way to go. And why not? Anything for “community”. Right Chris?
ryan l

March 27th, 2008 at 8:37 am

Wow I guess I just don’t get it. Drupal is fairly flexible on its own and with a few hours invested I’d say <10 you can have a decent site built.

I see this as basically saying hey…drupal your not doing a good enough job…lets kick it up a notch.

Drupal modules are fairly robust…short of a digg clone or myspace clone it has it all. With CCK and Organic Groups modules both are accessible if neccessary, but why not just go with ning or pligg?
Naveed Anwar

March 27th, 2008 at 8:39 am

Drupal is indeed the best way to go, we have built AOL’s Developer Network website dev.aol.com on Drupal and have no limitation or performance issues.
Hanan Cohen

March 27th, 2008 at 9:13 am

“or have hosted at any given Web host that supports Drupal with optimizations.”

The important word here is OPTIMIZATION.

I run a Drupal website at work.

I couldn’t get DreamHost PS to run the site with 50 concurrent users. Too heavy. No optimization allowed for Drupal.

Needed to switch host with root access to optimize several parts of the webserver for Drupal.

A project such as this should be able to run on a plain vanilla host with no special optimizations, for lots of concurrent users.
Nik Kalyani

March 27th, 2008 at 9:38 am

…in other words, the goal is to re-create DotNetNuke which already has 95% of the things described, is BSD licensed, over 4.5 million downloads, some 3000+ extensions and a ginormous community.
Alex Hammer

March 27th, 2008 at 9:40 am

The concept is a gamechanger, if it is well implemented (effective implementation would include/require leading adoption). It is an extension even beyond what we have beginning to do at Media 2.0:
Media 2.0 is a 14 blog network that leverages leading content, ad networks, community features and web 2.0 tools and resources to create destination sites across technology, news, politics, environment and related areas.
Harry Wang

March 27th, 2008 at 10:37 am

Uh, seems like this has been mostly done before!?

Harry “thinks Chris needs to finally lose the sideburns” Wang
TheChris

March 27th, 2008 at 10:42 am

Never heard of Chris Pirillo before this post, but, personally, he’s setting off all sorts of red flags. Does he really know anything?

Conceptually, I could dream up the perfect Web 3.0, semantic, customizable, social, video, blah, blah, blah…framework/platform. But it’s not easy to execute.
Frank Church

March 27th, 2008 at 10:56 am

@31- Actually, since DNN is not FULLY open source and doesn’t have at least 5% (probably more like 25%) of the features Chris is shooting for it is not a “re-creation”.

There is plenty of room for more CMS approaches. Don’t take your job so seriously.
Derek Scruggs

March 27th, 2008 at 11:07 am

@Hanan - the problem is Dreamhost. They are notoriously sucky regardless of the software. Drupal can scale very nicely unoptimized.
LeoMoon

March 27th, 2008 at 11:12 am

GOD he goes on my nurves!!! Why does he talk like that???
EH

March 27th, 2008 at 11:47 am

“A project such as this should be able to run on a plain vanilla host with no special optimizations, for lots of concurrent users.”

Absolutely unrealistic.
Nick

March 27th, 2008 at 11:49 am

@yongfook: I feel that!

Although I am a Drupal fan… it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Mo Kakwan

March 27th, 2008 at 12:06 pm

This is a powerful idea. Efforts are going to be need to be made to make sure to display and remind that this is heading towards something different and new. Initial development seems like it will move right through making a social network and people who see it early on will say it’s the same as everything else out there. Eventually I can see it blooming towards the lofty aspirations that Chris has put out… but it’ll be hard to get new blood on board while it goes through it’s initial “me too” dark period.
Rick

March 27th, 2008 at 12:18 pm

Sounds a little like Feed.Us, but not hosted.
Bram Wessel

March 27th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

My experience with Drupal (which I would like to think is fairly mainstream) is that I can see it’s enormous potential, but hit a wall with implementation complexity. To folks like me, this will be very welcome if it develops as promised.
Len Fischer

March 27th, 2008 at 2:44 pm

Noticed your mention of Crowd Fusion above. I tried to leave my name and e-mail for more information. It doesn’t appear Crowd Fusion’s feedback system/forms parser/etc. is working correctly because I kept receiving an error when I hit the submit button. Curious.
Rob D

March 27th, 2008 at 2:49 pm

Who is this guy?
anon

March 27th, 2008 at 3:06 pm

Drupal is already open source. Building an open source project on top of an open source, and defining very similar goals for both projects, is kind of a stupid idea.

At the end of the day, creating modules that clone existing sites and features is not difficult to do. However, creating them in a way that allows for flexibility, interoperability, and customization is incredibly difficult and will always require some degree of expertise.

In addition, I don’t think this guy has any knowledge of software development or of building web applications. He is just running his mouth.
Kai

March 27th, 2008 at 3:11 pm

I was gonna watch Seinfeld tonite but this guy made me laugh even harder
Ted

March 27th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

1) Not going to happen
2) Will never happen

Software Developer who decided to work on this project either:
1) Code Monkey
2) Insane
3) Doesn’t know Software Engineering
4) Will quit after several months (presumably because he’s just bored with anything)

Ask non-geeky user to use Drupal first before you moved on mmkay?

Even if you could simplify everything, what determines the word “Simple”?

By the time the project is completed, Web 2.0 is no more. Yet Another Chandler Project.
old ecard guy

March 27th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

The defined need is very real and would be wildly successful.

Unfortunately it’s like saying “the US needs to get 50% of it’s electricity from solar while being practical and affordable”. Uh… yea get right to work on that.

The fallacy here is the the installation and selection of components is the hardest problem.

The hard problem is allow upgrades and module changes over time that are not brittle and that are idiot proof.

If you look at the support forums for any CMS inevitably you see lots of questions about how this version broke that plug-in, etc.

This is possible to do, but it requires architectural and leadership changes, not repackaging.
Caligula

March 27th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

@ 34: “Never heard of Chris Pirillo before this post, but, personally, he’s setting off all sorts of red flags.”

And here’s another. When he’s not dreaming of The Future of Content Management Systems, he’s signing his friends up to watch ads online and get paid for it:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....s-a-fraud/
Mike Koss

March 27th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

Chris sent mail about this to the Seattle Drupal Users Group a couple of days ago. Since I’m just learning Drupal now, I can definitely see a need for an integrated installer.

Drupal is excellent in it’s modularity. The problem is, the core installation does very little. I’m up to about 20 installed modules on StartPad.org, and it’s still a very basic site.

For example, here’s the list of modules I’ve had to install (and why):

acl - basic user access control
adminrole - helper to give an administrator role permissions
cck - define custom content types
cck_address - a custom mailing address field type
cck_field_perms - set field level permissions
cck_map - display google map field
contemplate - custom formatting of content types
content_access - access control by content type
diff - display revision differences (wiki style)
forum_access - access control for forums
globalredirect - redirect (301) to canonical url aliases
google_analytics - insert google analytics
image - image upload
imce - rich text image upload
link - url field type
path_redirect - enable url aliases
pathauto - auto-generate alias (slug text)
tinymce - rich text editor
token - utility dictionary for other modules
views - generate custom views and filters

There is really no reason that these are not packaged together as “core” - except you’d get some disagreement in the community about what to include (different rich editors, for example).

Drupal is an interesting start for a base. But I wonder why not start with Ruby/Rails/Radiant or Python/Django/Ellington. You’ve got to believe that PHP’s days are numbered as a preferred platform choice. I can think of two reason FOR Drupal:

a) There’s not a big community behind a single CMS based on those platforms.
b) This is more of a design/integration project, rather than a development project.
helluri

March 28th, 2008 at 12:48 am

congratulations chris, you just inspired a new batch of bullshit bingo (http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/) cards that would be aimed at tech meetings..
i never thought techies would be this full of bs, or this much of a failure with ideas, so that they need to actually persuade the crowd for them.. but hey, you learn a new thing every day, right?
snarky bastard

March 28th, 2008 at 2:48 am

still laughing from arrington’s last comment…

there are good ideas here, but chris sounds like he got locked in the holodeck mid-clambake, and once the mushrooms kicked in, his idea finally clicked — and suddenly, atom smashing (pun alert!) techniques could be applied to rss 2.0 on a meta-referencing, widgetized, paradigm-shifting community-driven platform — so the lion and the lamb and the clingon and the romulan could finally go vegan in a blog atmosphere generator — together.

at least that’s what i got out of it.

has this guy ever been outside when it’s sunny?
Mark

March 28th, 2008 at 3:14 am

People, just learn to code using php or ruby. It isn’t so hard and when problems inevitably arise you dont have to spend weeks trying to fix it looking at code someone else wrote. Most of this modular stuff requires about a hundred lines of code which can be obtained from the net. As a sideproduct, you get to know how things really work.
The idea above is a noble one, but it has been done many times and the promised revolution always yields as a result just another compromise between performance, scalability, maintenance and expandability.
If you could build something complicated without touching the code, Zuckerberg would have used it to code Facebook.
Quess what? He didnt.
LA

March 28th, 2008 at 9:33 am

Who believes that the Drupal developers haven’t already thought through these issues? Who believes that the lack of these features is an oversight, rather than an incredibly difficult task to pull off? Who believes these things will happen if we just ideate them properly? Who believes this is a purely altruistic effort that will never, even if it’s accomplished, see the glow of a dollar or two?

I got bridges … lots of ‘em.
Edoardo Piccolotto

March 28th, 2008 at 3:52 pm

I ave written an article about this idea almost one month ago… everything can be found on the website http://www.web2bm.com of course when I have sent the file to some people I want noticed probably because I hadn’t enough visibility or money to invest. At least I can say that I hadn’t a bad idea.
Brent

March 28th, 2008 at 4:55 pm

He could have saved everyone’s time by compacting that 40 minute vid down to one announcement:

“We’re going to do what DotNetNuke already does.”
Damian

March 28th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

I would like to fight this guy. He makes all geeks look bad.
Jackson

April 13th, 2008 at 8:59 am

Pirillo is the P.T. Barnum of Tech (without the gift). It’s all about money to him.
Wibble

April 14th, 2008 at 4:06 pm

Why are we bothering with this guy? If that’s the best he can do at ’sincere’, he needs more acting lessons.

Is this an early April fools joke? … or another Borat?

I guess it’s entrancing in the “OMG what is this bloke on about?” way but what did he actually say in 50 minutes? I know he repeated several things, in amateur theatrical fashion, but were there any new ideas?

I guess he’s doing a great job at self publicity and by the time this idea fades away, he’ll be on to the next big thing, or the one after that or …

Rather than want to punch him, I just began wondering if he would end by saying: “… and world peace.”

I can’t believe I wasted the time typing this. Now who’s the idiot?

Doh.
john

April 22nd, 2008 at 8:17 pm

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