Drupal press corner
Drupal overall winner of the Packt Open Source CMS awards
Packt Publishing has just announced that Drupal won two prestigious awards: Drupal is the overall winner of the Packt 2008 Open Source CMS Award as well as the winner in the PHP category. The runner up in both categories was Joomla!. Winners were elected by a panel of industry experts as well as by visitors to Packt’s website.
The Packt Publishing awards highlight the growing impact Drupal is having on the CMS market, and they are a testament to the many contributions from dedicated Drupal community members around the globe. It is great to receive recognition for our work!
Acquia out of beta
After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!
The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.
Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!
Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.
Starting Acquia wasn't straightforward. To setup Acquia for success, it required hiring world-class people smarter than me, but that often lacked Drupal background, or even Open Source experience. It took a while before we hit our stride, but it is truly amazing to see how everyone got hooked on Drupal, and how much we have come together as a team. Thank goodness I didn't take that job at the bank, because I couldn't be happier. Everyone in the company is determined to contribute to Drupal's growing success, and with Acquia's offering, I think we can get Drupal into a lot of new and interesting places.
Going forward, you can expect us to help port more modules to Drupal 6 and to add more modules to Acquia Drupal to expand our support offering. You can also expect us to extend the existing network services in the Acquia Network and to see us add new network services that extend what we've started with update notifications, spam-blocking, and uptime monitoring. Details are available on our Acquia Drupal roadmap page (registration required) and on our Acquia Network roadmap page (registration required) respectively. And last but not least, you will continue to see Acquia employees be very active in the community. So buckle up, because this is only a glimpse of what is to come, and we're on the fast track now.
Google to invest 105,000 USD in Drupal
The summer is off to a great start as Google continues to blow loving kisses at Drupal.
Google just announced that they will sponsor 21 Drupal developer stipends in this year's Summer of Code program (SoC). To inspire young developers to work on FOSS projects during the summer, Google will provide a stipend of 5,000 USD to each student developer, of which 4,500 USD goes to the student and 500 USD goes to Drupal Association (or to the mentors). With 21 accepted applications this adds up to a 105,000 USD investment over a three-month period.
The accepted students, their projects, and the mentors are listed on the official Drupal.org announcement. Many of the listed projects touch Drupal core, so it looks like I'm in for a really busy summer. Congratulations to all successful applicants, and thanks to the Drupal Summer of Code organizers, the Drupal mentors, and last but not least, Google. Great!
Drupal is a Webware 100 winner
For the second time in a row, Drupal is a Webware 100 Awards winner. The Webware awards recognize the best sites, services, and applications on the web today.
Given that more than 5,000 products were nominated for the awards, and that nearly two million users voted to select the 100 top products, this award is a great testament to the awesomeness that is the Drupal community. The Drupal community is on a rocking spree!
BussinessWeek's Young Entrepreneurs of Tech
It is a real honor and privilege that BusinessWeek included me on their list of top 30-and-under innovators for 2008. I'm very happy to see Drupal getting this level of recognition from the business world. What BusinessWeek only hints at, though, is the importance of all the thousands of people, including my new colleagues at Acquia, who are working every day to make Drupal great. This is a big milestone for Drupal so congratulations to all of you.
Drupal makes the EContent 100 list
I received a plaque on behalf of the Drupal community. Why? Because we made it to EContent's list of the top 100 organizations that matter most in the digital content industry. More information at the EContent 100 website. It is always great to see our outstanding work being recognized. Good work team!
Drupal wins Packt's Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award
Packt Publishing has announced the overall winner of their 2007 Open Source CMS Award and it's Drupal! Runners up were Joomla!, followed by CMS Made Simple.
In an e-mail, Packt said that Drupal came first in every judge's result. They all commented on how much Drupal has improved and moved forward in the last 12 months.
Winning the Packt Open Source CMS award provides credibility to the Drupal project and makes it easier to show the rest of the world what an outstanding system Drupal is. It is great to see the Drupal community receive recognition for their hard work and dedication.
As well as the first place overall finish, Drupal also finished second in the two other categories it was nominated in: Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System and Best PHP Open Source Content Management System. (A CMS cannot win more than one category which is why Drupal wasn't first in any of the other categories.)