Buzzr News & Articles

Announcements are often timed for the beginning of conferences, and Drupalcon Chicago 2011 is no exception. In addition to the official launch of Acquia's Drupal SaaS offering, Drupal Gardens, Buzzr (news, site) has also announced that their SaaS Web CMS -- a Drupal derivative -- has officially exited from beta into full production release. Let's take a look.

Want to try Drupal (news, site) but don't want to deal with setting up servers, dealing with dependencies, and all of the stuff under the hood? Now you can, and you can even take your experiment into production with the first (non-beta) release of Drupal Gardens (news, site).

Welcome to the August installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Acquia, the commercial company founded by Drupal (news, site) project lead Dries Buytaert, and Phase2 Technology have joined forces around the OpenPublish (news, site) content publishing platform. OpenPublish combines the open source Drupal Web CMS framework with OpenCalais (news, site), a free semantic web metadata service provided by Thomson Reuters.

Lullabot (news, site) and Buzzr (news, site) announced a couple of things on Monday at Drupalcon. The first should make some potential enterprise customers happy, while the second might intrigue those who want to try out the service.

One way or another, everyone needs to eat -- and that includes all of you open source people too. Fortunately, there are as many ways to make money in the world of open source as there are people who try it. Here's a run down of the top models.

Forget all that talk about the cloud and SaaS. Many just don't want to have to worry about their own hardware, OS, and software. If you're one of this benighted group, there's some new options coming your way. Read on to learn about one of them, Drupal (news, site) style.

With all of the chatter about Drupal 7, it would have been easy to miss one or two Drupal-related announcements last April. One of those announcements dealt with Buzzr (news, site), a Lullabot (news, site)-spawned startup focused on bringing hosted Drupal solutions to the masses.

Aside from a small announcement last August, the folks at Buzzr have been pretty quiet, so we thought we'd check in.

Buzzr acquires its fellow Drupal-based monetize-your-hobby-or-business service Tipzu to generate momentum for the currently-private alpha project. 

We love playing join the dots in these stories. Tipzu was founded in 2007 by Chad Gracia, who launched the site on the back of his success with actortips.com. Tipzu, which went with the simple premise of "Start your own online business now" gets snapped up by Ed Sussman (of online media service Mansueto Digital fame) who is partnering with others to launch Buzzr with much the same concept.

As both are based on Drupal, tying the two services together won't be too much of a stretch. What will be of interest is how much better, easier to deploy or slicker Buzzr's drag and drop creation system will be over Tipzu. As a hosted system, Buzzr creates a visual design layer on top of Drupal so users don't have to know how to manipulate the code or worry about the technical side.

There's a rather old but insightful video that you can view, where creation is handled thanks to templates, widgets and a healthy dose of drag-and-drop. The comments to the video provide an interesting angle on the development. It is also easy to imagine how this could have come on in recent months.The interface and usability side are thanks to Karen McGrane of Bond Art & Science, a partner in the venture.

Ignoring the role reversal of the startup buying the established service, this has the potential to boost the popularity of Drupal even if end-users do not realize that they are utilizing it. Other developers have already expressed an interest in mimicking the overlay features for their own ends, so we could also see many clone services, or people taking this idea and running with it in new and cooler ways.

With a private beta planned but no word on an eventual release, keep your eyes open for Buzzr as a better way of building a personal or company site.