Media fragmentation is causing word-of-mouth advertising to be more important than ever.  Information product managers must put their messages into social media or risk not having a voice in important discussions.

The OSTIblog is OSTI's first full featured social blog site used for direct two way communication to the public.  In August of this year we completed a migration of our OSTIblog site from a different technical platform called Apache Roller.  Any of you who have been involved in site migrations or database migrations know its a lot of cost and effort.  Generally speaking migrations are not done on a whim.  These costs certainly beg the question, why was Drupal worth the effort?

Essentially, we reached an obstacle in our prior open source tool that we we couldn't overcome. 

Key outreach staff requested an "author index" of bloggers with links to their blog posts.  This was attempted with the Apache Roller open source package unsuccessfully.  Apache Roller uses the Velocity scripting language to manipulate the blog metadata such as titles, authors, etc.  The syntax in the documentation didn't work as advertised and there was not much activity from the developer community.  To be fair, we were able to do some 'Roller customization and it is a multi-user and a multi-blog site.

http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/authors?page=1

http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/users/walt-warnick

The advantage for Drupal was that the author index could be built using the existing metadata contained in the Drupal database.  Instead of scripting syntax, Drupal offered the Views module which is comparable to the report writer capability in Microsoft Access.  The Views module can essentially build almost any SQL query needed and provides a scalable solution for storing and managing these data views.  In addition to managing data configurations, the Views module has successfully implemented an open structure for innovative data presentations.  The two pieces work together to generate powerful displays including multimedia galleries, table based grids, lists, maps, timelines, etc.  Drupal also has a template system which allows you to apply traditional PHP, HTML, and Javascripting skills.  The views module also interfaces well with the templating system.  This condition provides a way to leverage traditional front end HTML skills with the power of a back end relational database.

Perhaps one takeaway here is that all open source isn't created equal - community activity makes the difference.  Even though Drupal's technical approach was more flexible,  that alone would not have justified the cost of a data migration.  Knowing there would be real people to help and collaborate provided the added confidence that was needed.

• Facebook  http://apps.facebook.com/ostiblog/
• Mobile http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php?emulator=nokiaN70&webaddress=www.osti.gov/ostiblog