Drupal News & Articles

JumpBox, provider of virtual appliances to simplify server software deployment, has just released six new appliances for open source products. The JumpBox library has been bolstered with new applications for Cacti networking graphing system, phpBB bulletin boards, ProjectPier project management, TikiWiki, PmWiki, and MoinMoin- another Wiki product.

The total number of JumpBox appliances now stands at twenty.

Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert has had a productive year, even by his standards. He wrapped up his PhD, became a father, started a company (Acquia) with Jay Batson, and, oh yeah, continued to steer the good ship Drupal towards modular, multi-user Web CMS heaven.

We caught up with the man just before Christmas, and collared him for a quick chat about Acquia, Drupal and OSS.

It’s Crystal Ball time once again, when every two-bit hack on the Web reaches for the ether and prises back the veil of time, peering into the murky future.

Dries Buytaert is no hack - he’s the founder of Drupal and the co-founder of Acquia. But he’s as entitled as anyone else to play Nostradamus, and he’s just outlined his vision of what we can expect in the open source CMS world, and in the Drupal project over the next twelve months.

Good news for sites pushing product: Mediasurface, a provider of web content management solutions, is joining forces with hybris, an e-commerce provider, to give clients an e-commerce web solution with the strength of a full-blown CMS backing it.

Sweet!

Last month we reported that Open Text’s data integration strategy rested on the shoulders of the Genio product, a technology they bought alongside the Hummingbird takeover in ‘06.

Now we get to see the finished article with the official release of Genio v7. This 64-bit information management application transforms, cleanses and directs structured and unstructured content from a range of repositories.

Featuring web service support and full content integration capabilities, Genio laughs in the face of incompatible system interfaces and proceeds to process content and digital assets from data marts, ERP systems, mainframe systems, CRM, and so on. (And, of course, from various content management frameworks.)

“When I examine the landscape of open source projects that have had a big impact on the technology industry, I’ve concluded that projects which have had the biggest impact (usually) have a well-capitalized company behind them.”

- Dries Buytaert, November 2007

Now there’s a headline you never thought you’d see. Young Innovations, a Drupal development firm from the mystical land of Nepal, has released a beginners guide, in English, for the Drupal open source web content management system. Drupal how to For Beginners was developed by Young Innovations in conjunction with SAP, and is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

Heads up, beta testers! the Drupal team has released Drupal 6.0 beta 3, the latest version of their award winning open source web content management system, and they need you to help dig up those pesky bugs hidden under the surface, pronto!

Bitnami.org has officially been launched, offering free installation stacks for a host of open source packages designed to make the deployment of such packages as Drupal and Joomla! infinitely easier for all.

As Packt Press continues to rattle off the awards this week, its Joomla’s turn in the spotlight. Today’s prize is for “Best PHP Open Source Content Management System”.

Quoting the Packt site, “Joomla! is possibly one of the biggest success stories in open source of late. Its first release came in only September 2005 and since then has grown to be one of the most downloaded Content Management Systems on the web.”

The runners up in this category were Drupal and e107 respectively. Previous winners this week were WordPress for Best Open Source Social Networking CMS and mojoPortal for Best Other Open Source Content Management System.

And the fun’s not over yet. No sir. Rolling right along you avid CMS’ers have both the Most Promising Open Source CMS award and the Overall Winner award to look forward to.

According to the company, the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS). This year they’ve broken the award down into a number of categories:

• Overall Winner
• Most Promising Open Source CMS
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Best Other Open Source CMS
• Best Social Networking CMS

And the first set of winners was just announced this morning.

It’s a kind of ‘Open Source 1.1’. Developers are springing up who build install stacks for open source products like the Drupal Web CMS or Alfresco’s Enterprise CMS; offering packaged versions which automate and greatly simplify the initial deployment, or offer various usability augmentations to these powerful but often occasionally less polished products.

Open source being repackaged in this fashion is something we have covered before — SpikeSource are in this line of business. Bitnami though, they’re taking things up a notch, introducing some welcome competition.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert recently gave an interview with PC World, in which he let slip some of the delights in store in the next installment of Drupal — as well as some interesting information on where the software came from, and where it is heading.

Just because the researchers at Gartner chose to overlook open source offerings in their latest enterprise content management evaluation does not mean that decision makers within your organization should go the same route.

To help fill the not so minor gap left by Gartner, Infoworld recently compared five open source content management products that are worthy of any IT manager’s shortlist — though with Alfresco stacked up against the likes of Drupal, perhaps not the same shortlist.

Once upon a time, in a TCP packet not far from here there was no blogosphere. A web-based journal was not known as a blog, or for that matter known much at all, not to mentioned considered a sane spend of one’s precious time.

Back then internauts given to verbosity had to either hack their own blogging platform together or nag a nerd to do it for them. My, how times have changed. And now we have so many choices.