Toward semantic WCM

Open source Web content management developer Drupal has announced the general availability of Version 7 of its namesake platform. A significant element of Drupal 7 is deployment of RDFa for adoption of semantic Web concepts and emerging technologies. Drupal 7 embeds semantic metadata that makes machine-to-machine (M2M) search native for a Drupal 7 Web site.

Drupal says RDFa can add value by giving search engines detail not visible to humans, such as the latitude and longitude of a venue for display on a map; or providing the ISO date format for localization and proper display in the search results for different countries. The Drupal 7 development program used a combination of contracted professional guidance and community-sourced feedback.

The Drupal Association highlights:

• user experience enhancements designed to make tasks easier and more intelligent/intuitive for content creators and to simplify administration;
• out-of-the-box image handling (resizing, cropping, etc.);
• a built-in, automated test environment claimed to provide a continuous integration test suite running against every patch for long-term stability of the project;
• version upgrade manager and migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7;
• performance and scalability improvements engineered to serve Web visitors faster via advanced caching, content delivery networks (CDN) and master-slave replication;
• custom fields in core, native data item fields for any content type or user, taxonomy and/or other entities, as well as translation support; and
• a robust database abstraction layer, enabling the use of many databases, such as Maria, DB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.