Drupal

Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.

The company announced the two initial products and services it will be offering, Carbon and Spokes. Carbon is Acquia's commercial supported version of Drupal which will focus on social publishing applications. Spokes is an update will be an enhanced update notification sercice that provides "site owners personalized alerts with actionable recommendations". At this time I'm, not clear as to whether Spokes will be available for just Carbon or for all Drupal distributions. Both services will be available through a subscription offering.

Open Source Community was the first place I saw mentioning an error in a post at Mashable.com regarding Drupal 6. OSC's article is Mashable Blunders, Cleans it up, and Moves on!

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.

As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.

Jeff WhatCott, Acquia, asked some important and thought provoking questions on his blog, "A Dormant Drupal Opportunity". While the post focuses on Drupal, I think the contents of his post can apply to almost any content management system (CMS) out there.

In the article, Jeff asks whether defining Drupal as a CMS does more harm than good in describing the scope of features Drupal has to offer. In his words, the term CMS is a "20th century term that completely undersells what Drupal is capable of" as social software and a means for collaboration. Considering I really didn't understand what a CMS was until the 21st century, I beg to differ that the term CMS is as ancient as he makes it sound. However, he is entirely correct...many of today's Web applications that we call a CMS, really are not just a CMS.

Jeff asks three questions in his post:

1. Do you think we should put the CMS term to bed?
2. Would it be possible to grab some of that team collaboration social software market opportunity for the Drupal community?
3. Why isn’t there already a billion dollar Drupal services ecosystem for team collaboration? What’s missing?

While I appreciate comments here, please be sure to go over to Jeff's post and respond there too. In fact, if you only want to comment at one site...go there so we don't steal any of Jeff's "thunder". I've already made my comments at his site and I've attached my response to the above questions below.

I'm looking forward to evaluating the new FeedAPI module for Drupal. Though one feature I haven't seen in any of the aggregators I've seen so far for Drupal...a way to snip the original RSS feed. Some sites provide you the entire post in the RSS feed with no teaser. This may be great for the reader, but I'm not sure everyone is happy to see their entire post on someone else's site.

From time to time, I've hacked the core to get me closer to how I would like the content from an RSS feed to display at my site. There has to be another way and perhaps FeedAPI could by my solution...

Development Seed: FeedAPI 1.0 Released -

As most Drupal users already know by now, Drupal 6 is currently at a Release Candidate 3 stage of development. For the Drupal community, this is a time when the developers are wanting people to test, report, and help fix any bugs found in these development version of the Drupal software. At this stage of development, Drupal.org still does not recommend Drupal 6 to be ran on the production server.

As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

In 2006, I helped bring a friend's Fish and Tackle store online using open source osCommerce. The project was ugly in both appearance and code as I was merging a legacy site with an SMF forum together with the osCommerce software. As I indicated back then, while osCommerce was functional I was not pleased with the software. I kept on thinking how much easier this project would have been if I had used what I consider as modern CMS's. Specifically, I was thinking Drupal and perhaps even Joomla!.

Except for some Python programming, I've done very little software development this decade with most of my efforts in the 80's and 90's (BASIC, Pascal, Perl, Tcl, etc). Those that know me know I've wanted to dig more into PHP and Ruby, but I have been distracted by one sorry excuse after another.

I just completed one of the most exhausting days at work I've had since switching over from operations to IT. Everyone wanted a "minute of my time" which translates in the real world to 20 minutes (if I was lucky). The last thing I really wanted to do after work was touch a computer. Yet, I find myself too excited to not type about some great news.

What is the good news? Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal, is starting his first Drupal startup. The working name for the company is Acquia.

Thus, I'm starting a Drupal company whose current working name is 'Acquia'. Acquia's software products will include a number of Drupal distributions -- for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal's founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community.

Already, some of the other CMS news related sites are wondering how the Drupal community will react to Dries' announcement. Comparisons are already being made to other open source CMS projects that have been torn between commercial and community interests. Take this CMS Watch post for instance: