Article contributed by Palantir.net
Earlier this year, World Business Chicago launched its new website at WorldBusinessChicago.com. More than just a cosmetic upgrade, the new site was re-designed and
The new site highlights Chicago business success stories, embedded videos, and photo galleries of the city’s soaring architecture and magnificent lakeshore. Meanwhile, the hard data contained within the site is just a few clicks away, making it easy for users to access WBC's wealth of research and statistics on Chicago's economy, key industries, and other demographic information. Links throughout the site provide a direct path to the files where this data is stored.
What's most interesting about the site, however, is not its design or functionality, but the fact that it is built using open source software. Open source software is developed "in the open"; all of its source code is available for people to use and extend for free. It's embraced by a wide variety of major industry players such as IBM, Google, and Red Hat. Innovative Chicago-based startups such as 37signals, Threadless, and EveryBlock have built their business models around leveraging open source technologies. In fact, people within those local companies have created entire open source web frameworks, like Ruby on Rails and Django, which are used by developers around the world to build their own innovative web applications.
The open source software used for the World Business Chicago site is Drupal, a cutting-edge Web content management platform that powers a large number of high-profile websites, including the official website of President Obama, WhiteHouse.gov. Drupal provides the flexibility necessary to build a site or Web application that not only looks good on the surface, but also provides sophisticated functionality that can be custom-tailored to meet the needs of nearly any conceivable use case. Drupal is supported not only by the developers that use it and contribute code to it, but by dozens of companies as well, including Palantir.net.
Drupal has been quietly gaining momentum in Chicago over the last few years. It is used by a number of well-known Chicago-based organizations and institutions like the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Chicago Public Media (WBEZ), Chicago Public Schools, and the American Library Association. A recent gathering of Chicago-area Drupal developers attracted over 300 attendees, and even more are expected for the next "DrupalCamp", which will be held June 26-27 at the University of Chicago Law School (http://www.drupalcampchicago.org/)
In March of 2011, Drupal users, developers, designers, evaluators and businesspeople from around the world will descend on Chicago's Sheraton Hotel and Towers for the semi-annual international Drupal conference, or DrupalCon. More than just another trade show or industry conference, DrupalCon provides an opportunity for developers to gather in one place to collaborate and innovate to make the software even better than it is already. The most recent DrupalCon, in San Francisco, attracted 3,000 attendees, and DrupalCon Chicago is expected to be even larger. For a few days next spring, Chicago will become the center of the Drupal universe.
You can find out more about DrupalCon Chicago at http://chicago2011.drupal.org/ and you can read about how Palantir.net leveraged Drupal to build the World Business Chicago site at: http://www.palantir.net/experience/world-business-chicago
