Buzzr update from CMS Wire

Interviewed (via e-mail) last week by Dee Ann LeBlanc of CMS Wire. Story came out today — http://bit.ly/LdDcF

Nice to see a journalist covering the inside pool of Drupal with real understanding.

Highlights:

“Staying with Drupal 6 lets the Buzzr team wait until they feel all of the necessary Drupal 7 modules are ready and stable before migrating the platform to the new version. Unlike many Drupal 6 users, however, Buzzr users may barely notice the change. No doubt they’ll get new functionality along with the update, but Buzzr is a usability layer on top of Drupal.”

and:

“Sussman hints that in addition to the main Buzzr release, they’re also working on “providing white label multi-site solutions for enterprises interested in rolling out social-media friendly sites quickly and efficiently — reducing their reliance on large teams of highly skilled developers.”

 

 

 

Ten of Thousands of Websites Are Using Buzzr Software Before We’re Even in Public Alpha. What’s the Deal?

Buzzr, our platform for simplifying the creation of sophisticated websites, has been in development for more than a year now. Yet even though we aren’t public yet, tens of thousands of sites have already adopted software from the project. More than 100,000 sites, we estimate. How? Open Source.

For this of you not too familiar with open source technology projects, a word of explanation is necessary. Strange as it may seem, we’ve released, free of charge, interesting parts of our work (“modules”) well before we were ready to release it on our own site. We’ve also contributed extensive work we’ve done on existing modules to make them much better.

The work ranges from making it easier for website visitors to vote on content they like, to making it easier to create a custom form, to making it easier to configure a website to begin with.

The open source deal is this: you can use the module for free, but once you come to depend on it, you’re probably going to want to see it working well. So you help by reporting bugs, submitting patches and making suggestions.  And we end up getting free help supporting our work. Below, I’ve listed some of the modules we’ve created or done a great deal of work on, along with some usage statistics.

We’re building Buzzr leveraging the Drupal project. A big part of what we’re doing is creating a usability on top of Drupal, as well as integrating a bundle of Drupal modules that work as a simplified solution for creating, hosting and running websites.  You can see a preview of the work here. http://buzzr.com/buzzr-demo-video-making-drupal-usable

We have lots more good stuff coming.  And if there’s a particularly important feature you hope becomes part of Buzzr or one of the modules we release on Drupal, please let us know!

Thanks to the entire Lullabot team, including Karen Stevenson, Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Angie Byron, James Walker, Jeff Robbins, Addison Berry and Matt Westgate for their work on these and many other Buzzr tools.

New Modules:

jQuery UI ; SimpleViews ;  Views Attach; Views Gallery ; Form Builder;

And here are some of the modules we’ve made significant contributions to:

Embed Filter ; Fivestar; jQuery Update ; Multiblock:  Voting API

Sample Usage Charts:

Buzzr’s Acqusition of Tipzu

Today, my company, Buzzr.com,  announced that we’re acquiring e-commerce platform, Tipzu.com.

Nice piece by Rafat Ali on PaidContent.org about the acqusition.

Also, a pithy analysis on CMS Wire.

Here’s our press release about the acquisition.