Omar Abdel-Wahab

Since the early days of CMS, I went through developing to and based on many CMS starting from EZ Publish, XOOPS, PHP Nuke, PHP Website to Mambo. I liked Mambo to the extent that I once started a small project in Mambo Forge to localize Mambo for Arabs. I must confess that when I first heard of Drupal it was in a real hurry thus I didn't take much time to 'study' Drupal. After some time I had the opportunity to develop a solution based on Drupal. At first things looked weird but after few hours of reading and browsing code I was astonished. Drupal is really incomparable to any other CMS -except Zope. Drupal has some weak points like every solution has. For starters: preventing guests from changing theme, having no expiration date for posts, lack of module installer, the poor forum shipped with the base system, not willing to integrate with any other open source solution, etc. All those are there in many other solutions and of course in Mambo and PHP Nuke. While I see drupal going from success to another. Still Mambo is moving very slow, even after the fork from Mambo to Joomla, things didn't heat up. I believe besides the name change nothing much happened to Mambo. Drupal's hooks gave it a great amount of flexibility and extensibility. Simply I put drupal aside from all other Open Source solution in regards to having the team doing some good amount of market research before implementing features thus choosing the right thing to do, still keeping own vision though. What I see now is Dries Buytaert, aided by the folks contributing the core, is going to take drupal the next level by the release of Drupal 5.0. Implementing some cool features like jQuery will make Drupal stand from the crowd, I even believe that posts all around the internet trying to distinguish one CMS from another which lead some guys to create a website specifically for comparing CMS applications only! I believe these posts will vanish few months after the release of Drupal 5.0. Dries, we are awaiting the next release!