[OpenFontLibrary] Why Drupal?

[Ron Williams]

Hello,
I'm Ron and I was contacted by Dave after submitting an error report. In 
response I proposed moving the site over to Drupal and based on the 
discussion with Dave, most of the site functionality can be built using 
existing modules with configuration. I won't debate any about this, but 
I will interject a few clarifications.

For one, I don't think I'd refer to it as Drupal fanboyism; more like 
the current system doesn't work and rebuilding it with a system whose 
members support FOSS and have already adapted the system to many 
different project types is a good direction to go. Once released I 
believe many Drupal developers will use and contribute back (through 
volunteer development and donations) to this project.

Drupal does have many modules and as mentioned quite a few are 
abandoned. Just because there are abandoned modules doesn't mean they 
weren't migrated to something better. Take for example the fckeditor and 
tinymce modules, with one swoop of the wysiwyg api module, they became 
the underdog and will most likely be phased out because their 
functionality is now part of another module. Another reason for modules 
going away is the migration to more CCK/Views based site implementations 
for long term maintenance. If all modules were doing is storing specific 
data in 4.7, but now they've gone away since it's better to do it with 
CCK and then modify the data on output.

Regarding a dedicated server being required, I can assure you that is 
wrong. I have personally rolled out sites on Godaddy's shared servers, 
Rackspace cloud sites, and (of course) dedicated servers. There are 
benefits to having a dedicated server, but it's far from required. 
Drupal is in use on a variety of high and low traffic sites, it recently 
was used for Earth Day 2010 which was linked from the Google home page. 
In that case there were multiple servers involved, but you'd expect that 
with any system.

-- 
Ron Williams
Lithic Media
E-mail - ron at lithicmedia.com
Phone - (410) 726 - 7869
http://www.lithicmedia.com