Any aspiring media mogul knows by now that harnessing the potential of the Internet means building Web sites that offer more than just static text and images. That means audio, video, Flash elements, infographics and, above all, interactivity. But how this holy grail of direct involvement with the public is being realized is something that has perplexed many journalists and media players for the last few years. One technology that some users say offers significant potential in this area is Drupal.

Drupal is a free content management system and blogging engine that was conceived six years ago for bulletin boards by then-22-year-old open source programmer Dries Buytaert from Belgium. Since then, Drupal has been pressed into service behind a number of high-traffic Web sites, such as Sony’s Musicbox, and is known for its strength in building online communities, earning it the tag line “community plumbing.” The software is written in PHP and is in version 5.0.

Journalist and media consultant Steve Yelvington, who helped set up BlufftonToday’s Drupal site, says he is currently working on deploying Drupal to the Morris company’s other regional newspapers.

Yelvington says more and more newspapers are using the technology for all their online content management needs, and points out the recently formed webgroup “Newspapers on Drupal,” which has more than 60 members around the world. Among the group’s posters are staffers at McClatchy papers who have been using the technology to improve their interactivity.

Drupal has a modular design, meaning a wide range of features can be added, such as photo galleries, e-commerce units, community blogs, calendars, buddy lists, personal profile pages and more. If you want specific features, programmers can design new modules, or work within the open source framework to develop software that better meets everyone’s needs.

“It’s a rapid development platform as well as an application, so we’re using it for experiments in aggregation and community filtering (the Digg model),” says Yelvington.

Drupal has been employed for company intranets, political campaigns (including Hillary Clinton’s just-announced Presidential bid) and various nonprofits. It is also used by the popular satire site The Onion and entertainment and gossip powerhouse Ain’t It Cool News.

KernelTrap, a site that covers news on open source projects, uses Drupal, as does Ourmedia, a free archive of non-pornography, non-copyrighted images, text, audio and video clips. In the citizen journalism sector NowPublic relies on Drupal to bring together news from all over the world, while the software is also used to power Placeblogger, which aggregates hyperlocal blogs by location.

“Newspapers should be convening and facilitating community conversation, working to build a stronger civic process with broader participation. Drupal naturally presents itself as a tool in this space,” said Yelvington.

While Drupal may be powerful, it can also be fairly complex, so the trick remains overcoming what some users describe as a fairly steep learning curve.

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Brian C. Howard is a graduate student at Columbia School of Journalism. He spent five years as Managing Editor of E/The Environmental Magazine and has written for Connecticut Magazine, The Green Guide, Alternet, Fairfield County Weekly, Oceana, Clamor and Britain’s Ergo Living.

Editors Note: NewAssignment.Net is also powered by Drupal thanks to the kind efforts of Chapter Three.