Drupal 7 dives into machine-readable web The machine-readable web has come a step closer thanks to open sourcers in the Drupal community. Drupal 7 has received sign-off - finally - adding the ability to embed semantic meta-data into sites using the open-source content management system. That means Drupal 7 is adding native support for the W3C's RDFa - a set of XHTML …
This is more exciting than just another acronym being implemented... RSS benefited greatly from being switched on by default in WordPress as it was no longer something that only techie types went to the trouble to enable. RDFa by default in a major CMS platform is a huge step forward for the semantic web.
Would you care to provide some evidence for the claim that Joomla is more widely used than Drupal?!?
... and calling Wordpress a CMS is a bit of a push - excellent for blogging, great for small sites, but seriously, do you know WTF you're talking about?
http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
TheReg is probably right.
Here are the Google trends on Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal.
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=wordpress%2C+drupal%2C+joomla&hl=en
The claim that Drupal powers more than 1% of the web comes from Dries Buytaert, leader of the Drupal project. He started a project to build a crawler to categorise sites, and Marc Seeger finished it. Marc wrote his thesis about the crawler. In Dries's April 2010 Drupalcon speech, he revealed that a crawl of the top million sites showed Drupal at 1%. His slides are online. It doesn't say so on the slides, but he also spoke about Joomla and Wordpress stats. I was in the audience, and I remember WP being at about 8%, and Joomla being at about 3. I'm fairly sure about WP, I'm less certain about Joomla. However, Drupal at that stage was definitely behind Joomla.
This also feels right - Drupal is typically used for more complex sites than Joomla. Naturally there will be more less complex sites, so we can expect that there would be more Joomla sites.
The Google trends graph shows that Joomla is dropping in the search rankings, but it's still well above Drupal. Of course this isn't necessarily a reflection of the use of the different CMSs, but I can't think of any sensible reason that it couldn't be.
With regard to whether Wordpress is a CMS. The majority of my business is built around Drupal and I'm heavily involved in the Drupal project. However, one of my clients uses WP very successfully to run their online industry specific newspaper. It's not a heavyweight CMS, but it's definitely improving all the time, and the latest version supports structured data. Remember that it wasn't Habitat that bought Ikea; it's the job of us Drupal developers to make Drupal easier and nicer to use than Wordpress. Drupal 7 is a good step in that direction. The user interface is better, but we still have a way to go to meet Wordpress. On the other hand, the structured data handling in Drupal 7 is in another league compared to Wordpress.
I do hope the author knows what the Drupal developers might have missed: HTML - and XHTML - are ALSO formats for encoding data in a machine-readable way ....
RDFa extends the vocabulary, so to speak, but there's nothing technically new here. The assumption that people will suddenly create semantically rich sites with RDFa, when they never bothered doing so in the much simpler HTML, is naive. Sweet, but naive.
Windrose, I wonder if you are missing the point, more so than the author. Of course, HTML and XHTML are machine-readable—you might as well point out that plain text or MS Word documents are machine-readable, as anything must be that is used on a computer. This is not the point of the distinction, however. The former are designed to present data primarily for the consumption of humans, whereas RDFa is intended to present data to machines for further processing (which may or may not be processed into data that is readable by humans). I suggest reading the W3C RDFa Primer that was linked in the article.
On the one hand - you can leave the admin area to use the same theme as the actual site - this is very is easy to use for many users as when they log in they see the actual site but have a simple 'Edit' button at the top of each page so they can update it.
But I tend to switch the admin theme for all users to Bluemarine which is a nice clean one. I then make sure the users can only access things they need to keep the interface clean and easy to use.
The only small problem is that when editing blocks the admin area reverts to the site theme to show where the blocks are - this has been a thorn for a while and I believe has been changed in D7.
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