Drupal - A CMS Platform for Government, Universities and NGOs

The year saw the widespread adoption of the open source content management system by a range of local organisations with significant interest being shown by government, universities and NGOs.

Among the organisations picking Drupal as their web platform of choice during 2012 were GCIS (the South African Government's communications division), the Western Cape Government, the University of Cape Town, The University of the Western Cape (for some of its business units), The University of the Free State (for some faculties), the United Nations, the Heart & Stroke Foundation, and the South African Older Persons Forum.

Rogerwilco was fortunate to work on many of these projects and, according to Jakes Redelinghuys, the company's CEO, 2012 marked a defining moment which saw the public sector start to embrace Drupal in a way many privately run companies had done so before them.

"We've been specialising in Drupal for over five years - in that time we've seen the local Drupal community expand significantly, but more to the point, we've seen a significant shift in the profile of the average Drupal user. "

Redelinghuys continues: "When we started our Drupal focus we found immediate interest in the publishing community, counting the likes of Media 24 and Pearson plc among our clients. While the public and NGO sectors have expressed interest in the platform over the years, it's really only been in the last 12 months that we've seen them start to commit to the technology.

"This is ironic given that one of the great benefits of Drupal is that it offers a free to use open source content management system."

Conceived by Dries Buytaert in 1999, Drupal started as a basic message board. Other people started contributing, so the project was made open source. Over the last few years the number of people working with the platform has grown exponentially - by 2012, it was estimated that more than 630,000 users and developers were contributing to Drupal.

For more on Drupal, read this blog.