For obvious reasons Drupal is an excellent content management system (CMS) to administer a corporate or private website. Coupled with a custom-made design a Drupal based website offers a complete package for todays needs.

However, in addition to this, Drupal offers a skeleton with which it is possible to create so called "project management systems" (PMS). Such systems are very suited for companies which have a need for digitally managing (online) content (on the intra- or internet). With the various modules available (e.g. CCK; for creating your project content type, Computed Field; for simple to complex calculations, Contemplate; to setup an initial automatic report module, and for instance Fivestar; to visualize the process of your project) you are able to create a system which is easily managable, well-organized and moreover, affordable.

For example: an employee can have an overview of his projects, his company projects, his financial status within the company, project images, movies, charts, maps, and so on.

The main benefit of using a CMS system to create a PMS is that it evolves according to state-of-the-art techniques and implementations on the internet; up-to-date.

Moreover, the ability to attach multimedia files (e.g. movies, images), implement automatic report modules, even to have automatically created quotations with the help of an online application is a huge advantage in favour of commercially available PMS packages.

With the help of the Drupal Contemplate module you are able to affect various field outputs (e.g. Body Output or Teaser Output) in a Drupal site for a specific content type.

However, you can also use the specific variables to use in your print.tpl.php of the Printer-Friendly Pages module to generate a custom-made print design of your nodes. Or in a more advanced way for the Pdfview module to create custom-made pdf files from your nodes.

Last Sunday, February 24th, together with two friends I visited the Fosdem 2008 conference in Brussels. During this exciting day we attended the following Drupal related talks and workshops:

1 - What's new in Drupal 6.0 - Gabor Hojtsy, Dries Buytaert

2 - Drupal Theming - Morten Heide, Bèr Kessel

3 - Usability and Drupal - Thomas Moseler

 4 - Asset Management using the Asset Module - Wim Mostrey

5 - Introducing the Apache Solr Module - Robert Douglass

6 - Challenges 4 the CMS of 2morrow - Tanguy Coenen

A poster I made for my work about implementing the Drupal CMS system for large projects who have a need for digitally managing content (products, samples, etc.). The poster is based on another poster regarding a CMS system I made and implemented for a large project.