Cascade Server vs Drupal

On Thursday and Friday, the content management system selection committee saw two presentations, one from Hannon Hill about their Cascade Server product and the other from Lucidus, a small web development company in New Hampshire about Drupal. I felt that there was greater enthusiasm for Drupal and am cautiously optimistic that drupal will be ultimately chosen.

Cascade Server is a proprietary software product that is a "push server". Essentially, it is a content management system that pushes out static webpages for deployment. Content developers and managers connect to the system and see a file-system like view (in a web browser) with a number of tools to edit pages and workflows for content approval and vetting. The pages that are actually deployed don't have any directly interactive components. Things like RSS feeds and lists of headlines are all pre-generated on the system and posted (e.g. by cron) on the actual site as static pages. This means that if any real interactivity is needed -- ie, any kind of response to user input -- it needs to be accomplished by other kinds of one-off packages or php scripts, rather than being an integral part of the system itself. This seems like a serious shortcoming to me.

Given that we've been working with Drupal, I don't need to describe what Drupal is or how it works. The presenter offered a presentation about Drupal and then showed how it could be used to address the three scenarios that he had been tasked with. There was intense interest on the part of the selection committee and many questions -- many more than when the cascade server was presented.

The presenter for Drupal made a persuasive case that the system selected needs to be able to grow and adapt to the changing needs of the campus. He argued that commercial companies need to focus on the key features that people know they need now, whereas an open source system, by encouraging the participation of the user community, has a "long tail" of additional add-ons and modules that only a small fraction of users want now. Not all of these might be ready or needed immediately, but some of them undoubtedly represented features that the University was going to want in the coming years -- we just don't know it yet. In the end, that was the key difference between the two approaches.

Using the Cascade Server, would be like the Red Queen -- running as fast as we can to stay in the same place. It would allow us to continue building websites as static pages, but would not provide transformational change in the kinds of services nor prepare the campus for the future. Drupal was hands-down the winner if the goal is to revolutionize the kinds of services available to the campus community.

I believe the process still has a couple of steps, including opportunities for the selection committee to actually use the products. The Drupal presenter encouraged the committee to contact a webmaster who had overseen the implementation of the Cascade Server at Plymouth State University (I think), but who was now someplace else in New Hampshire. One got the impression that she would not provide a favorable perspective of the Cascade Server.