develOOp another fine develOOpment

The website of McDonald's Australia is using Drupal. I'm lovin' it!

Visited the Boston Aquarium on Axl's birthday.

Yahoo! launched another Drupal site: Yahoo! Style Guide.

I'm blogging this from the car so I'm going to leave it at that.

On Tuesday August 17, Acquia is sponsoring a day-long code sprint at our offices just outside of Boston. During the sprint, we'll concentrate on addressing as many of the core Drupal 7 critical issues as possible.

Moshe Weitzman and Stéphane Corlosquet (scor) have already signed up along with various Acquians including Barry Jaspan, David Rothstein, Peter Wolanin, Alex Bronstein (effulgentsia) and Gábor Hojtsy. I will be reviewing, testing, and committing patches throughout the day.

If you're in the Boston area (or can get there) and you know how to fix bugs, write tests, and submit patches, you are more than welcome to join us. Acquia's exact address (along with a Google Map) is available at the bottom of the Acquia contact page. Space is limited, so please leave a comment if you plan to attend. This way we can plan accordingly and start coordinating the sprint ahead of time.

I hope to see many of you there, including plenty of new faces.

Social news website Digg (ranked 116th by Alexa) is using Drupal for their corporate micro-site and blog: http://about.digg.com. Cool!

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

The Drupal trademark policy was launched officially about 11 months ago. As explained in my blog post on the Drupal trademark policy, the purpose of the policy is to create a level playing field for all. It allows everyone to use the trademark without administrative hassle, while at the same time keeping some control and oversight to avoid dilution and misuse. For example, we all know the scarcity of cool domain names, and how frustrating it can be for a local Drupal user group to find that their domain name has already been taken by a commercial entity. The trademark policy seeks to resolve this problem.

Now one year later, there have been some interesting results from the trademark policy. So far, I have received 89 serious trademark queries. Twenty-three of these resulted in a license being granted because the requested use was intended completely to foster Drupal software. For example, there was a request for the name Drupal to be used in the title of a Drupal camp. There were other requests for the name to be include in non-commercial modules. These are all acceptable and good uses of the trademark.

In 32 other trademark usage requests, a formal license contract was required. Among the formal licenses, so far only four contracts have actually resulted in the payment of the administrative license fee. Although the fee is quite reasonable (i.e., 600 euros for clearly commercial use; 300 euros for mixed use), many correspondents ultimately changed their plan in order to avoid the administrative fee. In quite a few other cases where a formal contract was imposed but the intended use was clearly not commercial, no administrative fee was requested. These were typically requests from local Drupal groups.

Finally, there were several trademark usage requests that were rejected simply because they would endanger the level playing field due to their monopolizing nature. Examples of this include domain names like drupalhosting.xyz or drupalthemes.xyz.

I hope everyone can see that the trademark policy is not a money printing machine for me. In fact, it's the opposite. I have paid personally for the creation of the policy and the cost of responding to trademark usage requests. The balance between costs and income is quite skewed out of my favor, although the amount of payments seems to be increasing.

Nevertheless, I am happy with the results so far. I've learned a great deal in the process, and, despite a few unsupportive comments from some, the reactions I have received overall have been positive. In fact, the most common reaction is that, although they understand why they need to pay the administrative fee and why they cannot use a monopolizing domain name, they cannot understand why numerous websites seem to get away with trademark infringements.

This reaction is understandable, of course. Remember, though, that the trademark policy is still quite new. I trust that most members of the Drupal community will comply voluntarily with the policy. So far there hasn't been a need to be a lot more vigorous in ensuring compliance with the trademark policy. There have only been a few difficult people or organizations that have attempted to infringe on the policy, requiring me to become more stern at times.

As expected when we first announced this policy, there were some comments on the actual content of the policy. My lawyers are now in the process of preparing a slightly updated version of the policy. So if you have any suggestions on improvements, please share them with us. For now, though, I'm quite pleased at the results of our first 11 months of having a trademark policy.

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

It’s been fun to watch Drupal Gardens grow and mature during the private beta. In addition to building out the feature set, we’ve spent a great deal of time improving the stability and underlying performance of the service. And we’ve had a wild ride on Drupal 7 HEAD along the way, as Jacob Singh describes so colorfully:

Running from an Alpha versus HEAD is like the difference between playing Jenga on a sleeping elephant to playing Jenga on a cocaine addled elephant riding a skateboard being jabbed in the [rear] with a hot poker.

We’ve also invested plenty of time with Drupal Gardens users - gathering feedback, performing user tests, discussing potential features. One request that was added in the latest release is site duplication. This is the ability to clone an existing site, including its design, functionality, information architecture and content, to create a new site. It’s one of the first Enterprise Drupal Gardens features, enabling site builders and designers to do rapid prototyping in Drupal Gardens and roll out new sites quickly according to pre-defined templates. Site duplication will evolve into site and theme marketplaces where anyone can share site templates for use by others.

Drupal Gardens continues to advance with great strides. I encourage you to take Drupal Gardens for a test drive and to share your feedback with us.

There exists an interesting story about a man and a butterfly cocoon. It is about a man that found a cocoon, and brought it home to watch it turn into a butterfly. As the butterfly inside matured, it struggled to get out of its cocoon, but couldn't quite get free of it. One day, the man became tired of waiting and decided to help the butterfly. He removed the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly was pleased, but it had a swollen body and small, wrinkled wings. As a result, the butterfly never succeeded in flying and spent its entire life crawling around.

What the man didn't understand was that the struggle required for the butterfly to break out of its cocoon actually forced fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom. It is the struggle that causes the butterfly to develop its ability to fly.

I feel the same way about Drupal 7. Seeing Drupal 7 getting steadily closer to its release, is like watching a cocoon grow into a butterfly: the inevitable results are going to be spectacular. Release management and fixing bugs is hard work, the work of a determined caterpillar. However, I think Drupal 7 will be quite a metamorphosis relative to Drupal 6. Not only will it look different, it will function differently -- making users and developers feel like Drupal spouted wings.

And like the caterpillar that grew into a butterfly, it won't be the Drupal many of you used to know. It will be a nicer looking, more powerful, and more scalable Drupal that is easier to use. If you overlooked Drupal previously in favor of another system, you might want to revisit Drupal once Drupal 7 is released. I think you will be surprised at the difference. Or if you know someone that overlooked Drupal in the past, you might want to echo this story.

I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website's content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn't.

I want the software that runs my website to be stable, efficient at handling my website's traffic, and flexible. Good content management systems meet these requirements, but it took years to get where we are today, and we still have a really long way to go. Fortunately, all my websites run Drupal, so the first part of my requirements presents no problem. If you want, you can have a Drupal site too -- it's free! :)

I also want the website content to be of high-quality. That applies to both the quality of my own writing, as well as that of others that participate on my site. I believe this is a much more difficult problem to solve -- I'm interested in helping to solve it.

I'll be moving from an apartment to a house with a small yard, so last weekend we bought a hose to water the plants and the grass. Now that I'll have to get into gardening, it struck me that maintaining and improving the quality of my website is a bit like gardening too.

First and foremost, you have to keep the weeds out. In the world of websites, that means preventing spam comments and other unwanted posts. I never liked weeding -- as a kid, I had to help weed our garden. Collecting a bucket of weeds each vacation day was no fun. I don't like manually deleting spam comments either, so I addressed that with Mollom.

So far so good -- Drupal and Mollom make me a pretty happy camper as my two requirements are mostly met.

Just weeding your garden, though, doesn't make it beautiful or interesting. The same is true for websites. My favorite websites are those where the quality of the comments exceed the quality of the actual posts. I think there is much more that can be done to improve the quality of content on websites.

For example, I often wish I could tell people that their comments are poorly written or formatted before they even submitted it. It would be nice if more comments used proper capitalization and punctuation like we learned it in school. Or better yet, imagine having a service that estimates the added value of any new comment, or that somehow encourages thoughtfulness and constructive debate. I know I'm dreaming (and rambling a bit), but I also believe that these kind of tools are in our future for those that want them. They would be a natural addition to Mollom so maybe I'll be working on them myself, especially if people keep getting their capitalization and punctuation wrong. ;-)

While many of you (in the United States, at least) were out enjoying 4th of July cookouts over a holiday weekend, our servers at Mollom remained hard at work. Around 10pm on Sunday evening, while fireworks colored the sky here in the US, Mollom blocked its 250,000,000th piece of spam. The timing couldn't have been better; it's almost as if the fireworks were also for us. ;-)

That is 250 million pieces of content Mollom prevented from cluttering up your sites, and 250 million times we saved administrators all across the web from laborious work in comment moderation queues. If it takes 10 seconds to delete a single spam comment, Mollom has saved site administrators almost 80 years of non-stop work. That has to be worth a few firecrackers at least!

About 20 months ago, at Acquia, we began working on a hosted offering for Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Exactly one year ago, we launched it commercially as Acquia Search. Time and the public reaction have proven that we made the right choice. In the past year, Apache Solr has received a tremendous amount of traction in the Drupal community. Most large sites launched recently use Apache Solr because it provides a faster, more scalable search solution, as well as improved search accuracy and more features than the built-in search features of Drupal's core.

If you want to install, run and maintain Apache Solr yourself -- assuming you have the resources required -- you can of course do so. However, many organizations lack the technical expertise to deploy, maintain and scale Java applications. Even if they do have the resources, it's often cheaper to use Acquia Search. Acquia Search has been part of our overall plan to sell simplicity and enhance the experience of using Drupal. Today, the majority of our customers that subscribe to the Acquia Network, which includes very large Drupal sites, actively use Acquia Search instead of maintaining their own or using Drupal core's built-in search. In the past three months we have handled about 20 million search requests on behalf of our customers. These are important proof-points of our strategy.

The growth in popularity of Apache Solr and the story of Acquia Search haven't finished, though. This week we released some excellent new features for Acquia Search which we believe will further help drive adoption of Apache Solr and Acquia Search. We added support for attachment indexing (e.g. search PDF and Word documents), multi-site search (i.e. search multiple Drupal sites at once), and other additions. For more details on this latest release of Acquia Search, check out Peter Wolanin's blog post on the subject. I think our customers will be quite pleased at the improvements we've made in this release. And if you're not using Apache Solr or Acquia Search, you should seriously consider implementing it. It's cool stuff. :-)

The New Flemish Alliance (Dutch: Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, abbreviated as N-VA) is using Drupal for their website: http://www.n-va.be. The N-VA is a Flemish political party. They became the largest party in both Flanders and Belgium in the 2010 federal elections a few weeks ago.

Have you seen this before? It's a built-in spy mirror to watch your kids on the backseat. Nifty.

Acquia recently wrapped up its latest internal development sprint. One new development that was announced is the fact that Drupal Gardens is now protected by Mollom's spam protection services.

What does this mean for Drupal Gardens users? Just what you'd think. You receive the best spam protection available on the web from Mollom. There is no setup, no hassle, and no cost.

What does this mean for developers? A great example of how to provide Mollom to your customers, in the form of the Mollom API module for Drupal. The Mollom API module was developed by Jacob Singh and Gábor Hojtsy from Acquia. The Mollom API module uses Mollom's Reseller API to automatically provision the service and to programmatically obtain public and private keys for each Drupal Gardens site.

Clickability, a proprietary SaaS platform for content management, has compared SaaS to Open Source. Not only is the comparison inaccurate, it omits the downsides of SaaS and frankly, they are comparing apples to oranges. Open Source is a licensing and development model, SaaS is a software delivery model. Either they are distorting things on purpose, or they don't understand Open Source at all. In other words, time to look at some good ol' FUD and to share my take on Open Source versus SaaS.

To give you a sample of their comparison, take Clickability's take on integration:

Screenshot taken from Clickability's SaaS vs Open Source comparison.

One of the biggest advantages of using Open Source software is that there are no limits on what services you are "allowed" to integrate it with. Given the number of sites that Drupal powers and the size and strength of the Drupal project, official integrations with other software and service vendors are abundant for Drupal. If you need integration, for example, with a highly specialized, niche product or web service, it may already exist among the 6,000 contributed modules for Drupal. If it doesn't, you are free to create it yourself. The same is true for other Open Source projects. Good luck getting that into the development cycle of a proprietary SaaS platform.

In many ways, Open Source is actually less risky than putting all your eggs in a single proprietary-software-basket. If you are unhappy with a particular Open Source company or service, you can take all the code and go to the next company.

Or take their section on hosting and performance:

Screenshot taken from Clickability's SaaS vs Open Source comparison.

I won't even begin to debunk what they write on self-hosting -- it doesn't have anything to do with being Open Source. Suffice to say that the great thing about FUD is that it validates our work in the Open Source community. They wouldn't have such a comparison page if they weren't worried about Open Source disrupting or slowing down their business.

My take on Open Source versus SaaS?

It is true that SaaS enables organizations to save money on hardware, configuration efforts and avoid hosting and maintenance hassles. However, proprietary SaaS vendors like Clickability need to ask themselves what happens when we start building SaaS solutions based on Open Source values. Open Source SaaS offerings, like Acquia's Drupal Gardens offer the convenience and support of SaaS multiplied by the benefits of Open Source.

We all know that Drupal can work with Varnish, a HTTP accelerator that caches pages in virtual memory. Well, now Varnish uses Drupal too! Varnish Software, the company behind Varnish, just relaunched its site using Pressflow, a Drupal distribution with performance and scalability improvements. The site was built by Kodamera.

Leffe, one of my favorite Belgian abbey beers, is now using Drupal for their main website: http://leffe.com. Cheers to that!