Drupal News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS 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.

Red Hat (news, site), one of the poster children of the Linux and open source communities, has launched a new online community to promote open source across various industries.

Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) hopped up on his soap box today to announce the launch of Drupal Gardens into private beta.

Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of the content management system with aim to please. As Buytaert put it, “Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites."

Voila:

Needless to say it's a pretty big move for the platform, and it will certainly be interesting to watch how it does next to popular alternatives.

Sick of losing sleep over installations or upgrades? The team plans to release more registration codes during the next few months, so make sure to request on here.

Some people are never content to sit back and enjoy what they've accomplished. Rob Klause is one of these people. He took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about working with the Executive Office of the President, Drupal (news, site) and Siteworx.

Are you somehow not aware that Drupal 7 Alpha was recently released? Or are you just so busy that you don't have time to check it out for yourself? A Drupal (news, site) tutorial site has released a video preview.

Hoping to present at DrupalCon 2010? The call for presentations is now open. This year's tracks are:

• Welcome to Drupal (news, site)
• Design, Theme and Usability
• Providing Professional Drupal Services
• Configuration, Set-up & Administration
• Under the Hood
• Leveraging Drupal for Your Business

In order to submit a session proposal, you need to have already purchased your ticket to DrupalCon and log into the conference site. Session submissions must be turned in by February 15, 2010. From there:

• The public votes on sessions from February 16 through March 1
• Speakers are notified on March 5
• The final schedule is posted on March 15

The conference itself begins April 17 with the Core Developer Summit and ends on Thursday April 22 with the Code Sprint. The event is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco -- a fine city to keep yourselves entertained before and after the festivities.

Drupal 7 (news, site), much anticipated, is now out in Alpha 1 release and the call for testers is upon us.

This is the first time that version 7 of the open source Web CMS is being offered to the entire Drupal community, and of course, the rest of the world.

Angela Byron (aka Webchick), Drupal 7 project co-maintainer, talked about three queues she wanted testers focused on prior to today's release including:

1. Looking for "seriously" critical bugs related to API breakages, the broken upgrade path or missing security updates, and any user-facing bugs that don't make D7 look all that fantastic. Look for details on her D7 alpha hit list.
2. Getting documentation on API changes up to date. Angie is hoping that developers make good on their #D7CX pledges so that the updates of modules from 6.x to 7.x isn't stalled.
3. Final reviews of the user interface text.

Of course as hard as the community may work, all these things have probably not been complete, but the Alpha 1 release has come out just the same. This release is being treated as a stable release, so no new changes will be made unless they are non-API-breaking bug fixes.

To make the release even more special, it comes on the 9th anniversary of Drupal. Says Dries Buytaert:

Exactly nine years ago, I released Drupal 1.0.0. When I shared my hobby project with the world, I expected no more than a dozen people to actually use it. It took a large community of people to make Drupal successful, but today, Drupal has hundreds of thousands of friends. Thank you to everyone who has been and is contributing to Drupal. Rock!

So happy birthday to Drupal. Now head over to the Drupal Project website and get your D7 Alpha 1 download, or just select form here:

• 7.0-alpha1 release: Download | Notes
• 7.x-dev snapshot: Download | Notes

Kaltura (news, site) is making a number of moves lately with its open source video platform. After being listed as one of 10 Innovative Application Companies Under $100M to Watch by IDC you probably expected to start seeing things happening. And happening they are.

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

Drupal (news, site) has long considered itself a social software solution as much as a web content management system. That may ring even more true not only for Drupal, but Joomla (news, site) as well, as Google announced that both open source WCMS now integrate Google Friend Connect.

Martin Aspeli of the Plone (news, site) project recently sat down and evaluated a "whole slew" of web content management systems. From there, he's digested his observations and shared them in the form of a fairly extensive writeup. While it's obviously Plone-centric, there's a lot that applies to anyone who's trying to choose what Web CMS they want to work with.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

If there's one thing near and dear to a writer's hard little heart, it's content. Unfortunately through much of the history of the web, content is always the last thing people worry about when building a site. Content Strategist Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder of BrainTraffic.com, aims to change all that.

Are you the type that just uses sites like MTV.co.uk, or are you more one to stare at it and try to figure out what it's running? I could say that it's running Drupal (news, site), which it is, but the answer isn't quite that simple.

On July 17 Open Atrium (news, site) was introduced to the world. The software is a distribution of the popular open source Drupal CMS framework (news, site) packaged up in the form of an intranet and knowledge management tool.

A mere 75,000 downloads later, Open Atrium now support 31 languages at varying levels of translation. The team behind this social business software used by small groups working together as well as large, geographically distributed organizations, has some firm ideas about the future.