On Monday, Acquia announced that X.commerce has migrated the X.com developer website and all developer-related content on eBay and PayPal to Drupal 7. Drupal 7 is an open-source content management system (CMS), or a platform for managing the operation of a website. Drupal was created in a Belgian dorm room by Dries Buytaert, who open sourced the project in 2001. Six years later, Buytaert co-founded Acquia. According to the website, “Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system.”
The aim of X.commerce is to enable the development of tools and technologies to enhance the online shopping experience for consumers. According to Naveed Anwar, head of Community at X.commerce, “Our goal at X.commerce is to create an open commerce ecosystem that developers, technology providers, merchants – and ultimately consumers – can benefit from. Working with the open-source technology that Drupal provides fits in very well with our philosophy.” With over two million downloads since it was first released, Drupal is used by developers throughout the world to build sophisticated community websites. A wide array of organizations use Drupal as their core social publishing system for external websites and internal collaboration applications.
The Drupal community of open-source software has more than 630,000 users and developers. In order to complete the migration of the X.commerce site, Drupal is working with its partners, VML, a digital marketing agency, and TAM Software, a web engineering company. According to Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia, “X.commerce is at the forefront of development in the commerce technology universe, and we’re delighted that the business – along with eBay and PayPal – sees the effectiveness of Drupal as a best-of-breed, enterprise-level solution. We look forward to helping these market leaders by ensuring a smooth migration, and will work with them to develop new capabilities and technologies that advance the goals of their developer communities.”
According to an article from Wired, Drupal now runs an estimated two percent of all websites on the planet. Before embracing Drupal, the X.commerce website, x.com, was created and run on the Jive Software platform. The chief technology officer of open commerce at eBay, Neal Sample, had this to say about the move to Drupal: “We found that Drupal offers more tools and does so faster. There were certain tools we needed built, and often, if you go to a single vendor, you just get in line with everyone else. With Drupal, we can tap into a bigger development community to get the tools we wanted – if they weren’t there already.”
There is quite a debate raging currently about the pros and cons of Drupal. Drupal currently is used for a wide variety of companies ranging from small businesses to global corporations, including Twitter, the Economist, AOL Corporate intranet, Harvard, MIT, Sony, MTV UK, Warner Brothers Records, and many more. We are excited to see what comes from the partnership between X.commerce and Drupal.
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