Forum One's tech department has evolved into primarily a Drupal shop. Drupal is a great fit for a lot of our clients, and the majority of our technology solutions involve molding Drupal to fit with our project needs.

Every successful development firm has learned to adapt quickly to changes in their environment. While Drupal is pretty robust, it's not the right tool for every job. In the past, we as a team have used tools such as SyntaxCMS, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, and WordPress to get the job done. This kind of technical diversity is essential for any development shop.

Every once in a while, I come across a tool or service that seems to stand out. Enter Firerift.

Firerift is a Content Management Tool, just like Drupal or WordPress. It was first released in August 2009, and is built on top of CodeIgniter. What seems really cool to me is that it's mainly a UI layer on top of a JSON API. This means that practically any data on the site can be retrieved via a REST API call (and this API can be set as public or private).

Another interesting feature is its seamlessness with design. It supports a CSS data layer, where you give your HTML elements specific CSS classes, and Firerift uses jQuery to stick content into those classes. Within the class attribute, you can also specify things such as order (opt_random) or limit (opt_limit_5). While this may not be the most efficient approach, and while the list of CSS options seems a bit scarce, it's still something totally unique.

The fact that all the database information is accessible in raw form seems like a really innovative approach. This holds especially true for government clients (such as the Census Bureau), where data openness is strongly encouraged.

Firerift is JavaScript-heavy, and JavaScript must be enabled for it to work. Also, the code is closed-source (and it costs $49 per top-level domain) -- which may put a damper on the number of contributed extensions. Lastly, Firerift is AJAX-heavy and, therefore not very SEO-friendly. Take this into consideration before proposing as a solution to SEO-conscious clients.