The committee building the 2008 revision of the main Cornell Library web site chose Drupal after evaluating several other options for source code control systems. There is not much documentation of the early stages of the decision making process. It takes a long time to evaluate these systems, and there wasn't much of it. Several other options were considered early on, but there was only time to concentrate on a few with high potential.
Here are some notes from the CUL Webvision Committee's decision process:
Minutes of Nov 16, 2007 meeting
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Technical Evaluation by the Design Subgroup
CUL Vision Report - Web Site Development Recommendations
Platforms finally evaluated
- CommonSpot 5
- Contribute/Dreamweaver
- Drupal
Contribute/Dreamweaver was eliminated quickly
- produces a static site that is hard to maintain
- no CUL system integration or content re-use
Commonspot vs. Drupal
- Open source provides options for flexibility, debugging, testing that proprietary code and database definitions does not.
- DLIT has very little ColdFusion expertise, lots of php experience.
- Commonspot 5 required upgrading servers to ColdFusion 7 and upgrading all 16 sites from previous version.
- Commonspot costs $5500 per year, upgrade to CF7 would be around $2500. It also requires a dedicated server.
- Drupal would be implemented on existing servers without interfering with their current uses.
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