On the release announcement, they are stating that they want to release version that include only security updates and versions that include security + bug fixes. While I can appreciate that they are trying to follow the “try to make everyone happy” model, they are, in my opinion, just adding to the general consensus that Drupal is a complicated and highly technical CMS.

While this may very well be the target market that Drupal is aiming towards, one would think it would be more sensible to attempt to follow suit with the whole customer experience movement that is occurring right now and try to make things as transparent and easy as possible for the end users.  Unfortunately, it seems that the Drupal team is not heading down this path.

In my opinion, Drupal should offer separate release announcements. One for the 6.x series with a countdown as to when this series will stop being supported so that those on the platform, know when it will be grandfathered and will be better able to plan a transition to 7.x.

For those on the 7.x version, I would personally just offer a single version. However, if it’s absolutely necessary to have two types of installs, why not simply offer one version and within the upgrade process have a prompt for the user asking them if they’d like to do a complete upgrade (with security + bug fixes) or a partial just to address security issues and have the system do what’s needed. Single file, single download, no confusion.

For release announcements, I think that Drupal needs to spruce things up a bit and write-up announcements that give more detail and less technical terminology akin to the way that the Joomla! and WordPress teams do their write ups. It’s a fairly easy change to make and is more likely to get picked up by people and get them excited about the new release. If  the customer wants more technical information, link to a more technical document. Otherwise, follow the keep it simple methodology.

I am aware that the Drupal teams have a ton of work and do the best they can with all of the tasks at hand and I don’ t want to come across as someone who doesn’t appreciate their efforts. I do, however, believe that there is always room for improvement and it is my hope that they take this writeup as feedback and not as an attack.

Take a look at this graph for instance:

As you can see, certain systems perform better than others and what I found especially interesting is that contrary to what you might hear on the ‘net, Joomla actually shows quite well from a security standpoint.

As part of the interpretation of this analysis, the author came to this conclusion:

• WordPress only had a single serious vulnerability (in case I interpreted that correctly) — impressive.
• Drupal did also well, only the percentage is a little higher due to the low number of overall issues.
• In contrast to the first two, TYPO3 appeared to not do well at all. It has by far most serious vulnerabilities both in absolute numbers and the percentage. However, I would attribute part of the difference compared to the other projects to TYPO3′s stricter rating of vulnerabilities. One should probably add a CVSS comparison to Drupal to get a more balanced result.
• Joomla, while having the most vulnerabilities overall, did very well with serious ones (meaning it had few of those).
• SilverStripe seems to be floating somewhere between the other projects, neither being exceptionally good or bad.

Unfortunately, I have grown to regret offering to act as a sponsor. One of the things that I’ve noticed this year more so than others is how poorly organized these awards are. They seem to serve more as a marketing tool for PacktPub to drive traffic to their site than to add value to the community. Sure, there are monetary values attached and it’s great that these prizes are awarded to worthy projects but there are also serious flaws in how these awards are run.

Take for example the “Best CMS for Ease of Use”  category.

One would expect a CMS that is actually easy to use and has a history of being easy to use to win this, right? Guess who won this year? Drupal.

Drupal is a great project, but if there is one thing it is not known for, it is ease of use. Drupal has to be the absolute last CMS that I would ever name in this category. It’s not shooting to be the easiest, but rather the most versatile and that is one of it’s strengths, but to give it this award is just plain ridiculous.

I am not attacking Drupal. I am a huge fan, but even the members of the Drupal community have to be honest and admit that this is a bit far fetched. I chose to use it as an example because it’s a very good one.

There are tons of open source projects out there that do not have huge communities of people that can vote for them and this is one of the ways these awards fail. They rely on voting from the community.

I’m all for giving the public a chance to vote but let’s be realistic here. If you pit the huge community of Drupal, Joomla or WordPress users against another smaller project, who do you think will win in sheer volume of votes? Does this mean it’s indeed a good indication of which CMS is best? Not at all.

This isn’t just about CMS though. This is about the awards as a whole. Most of the winners are well known projects that have been well established for quite some time: JQuery, Blender, Gimp. All wonderful projects with huge communities. There are a few that won that are lesser known and I’m very glad they got the recognition they deserve such as ImpressPages, for example, but they are the exception to the rule.

I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down the winners of these prizes. I think it’s great that they are getting cash for their projects and there are plenty of great projects listed. I simply do not think the awards themselves add any real value other than to contribute money and provide Packt with some extra traffic for the 3 or so months they run.

As I mentioned, CMS Critic acted as a sponsor this year and, as expected, Packt kept in touch with me to let me know of the various stages and how they were progressing so I could publish stories keeping the community informed. Then came the time where the winners were announced and I received not a single email to inform me of any winners, no press releases, nothing. In fact, I completely forgot about the awards until I saw a post somewhere else mentioning the winners. Yes, it’s partly my responsibility to keep on top of these things but one would also expect that they would be in contact to ensure the proper amount of promotion is given to the winners, and I didn’t hear a word.

Perhaps I’m expecting too much, I don’t know. What I do know is that I won’t be sponsoring next year.

I’m not here to just rant (although I do it well). I’m here to offer suggestions on how I would fix it as well, and here they are:

1. Implement proper judging by a group of known open source advocates and experts in their respective industries.
2. Maintain voting for a “People’s Choice” set of awards for purely recognition purposes with no monetary prize assigned.
3. Bring in some other sponsors to up the prizes amounts and allow for more competition.

What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Do you have a better idea? I’d love to hear from you below.

Several critical bugs with the OpenID have been addressed in this release, among other critical and major bugs, and a few new API features.

To grab the latest release, visit their website: Drupal.org

My presentation was based on the results of the State of Drupal survey, which got over 3,000 responses from people all over the world. Because I didn’t have time to talk about all the survey questions in my keynote, I’ve decided to make a summary of all the survey results (PDF, 160 KB) available as well. It gives a more complete view on the survey results.

Without further adieu:

For those who are currently running earlier versions, upgrading is highly recommended in order to take advantage of this and other fixes.

Unfamiliar with Drupal? Read our Drupal review.

They include:

Insight: Developed by Acquia, Insight provides Drupal site owners with a dynamic, real-time, at-a-glance view into their sites. It provides metrics for a wide variety of site elements to ensure they are up-to-date, secure, and performing well. Insight:

• Identifies and troubleshoots site problems in real time;
• Audits modules for code changes, and offers fixes;
• Recommends courses of action to address problems and resolve issues;
• Instills Drupal best practices to reduce mistakes and eliminate errors.

To sign up for the Insight Beta program visit http://acquia.com/insight.

SEO Grader, powered by Volacci, provides an internet marketing review optimized for Drupal. SEO Grader:

• Confirms redirects and SEO-friendly URLs;
• Analyzes page structure, “crawlability,” and “findability”;
• Provides advice on best practices for SEO specific Drupal modules, configuration and more.

Blitz, powered by Mu Dynamics, is a self-service load and performance testing platform that enables developers to deploy high-performance websites with confidence. Blitz:

• Load tests elastically from multiple regions worldwide;
• Scales up to 1M+ users in a few minutes;
• Easily integrates an iterative load testing process into the development cycle.

Drupalize.Me, an extensive library of tutorial videos that speed the acquisition of key Drupal skills. Drupalize.Me:

• Includes over 335 videos, totaling 149 hours of Drupal & jQuery training;
• Is developed by Lullabot, a firm recognized for their leadership in Drupal training.

In addition, Acquia is announcing the availability of the Acquia Apps Market in Q4, 2011, utilizing the Acquia Network API. The Acquia Apps Market allows software vendors and developers to offer their services and applications to the more than 50,000 Drupal websites served by the Acquia Network. The Acquia Apps Market includes a store where Drupal users will be able to purchase applications developed by third parties. The beta program in progress now includes the four new apps mentioned above, plus four others that are already delivered via the Acquia Network: Mollom spam blocking, New Relic performance optimization, Mobify mobile interface design suite, and Visual Website Optimizer A/B testing tool.

“Acquia has the broadest set of relationships with organizations that provide software, tools, and education for Drupal, and I’m pleased that we continue to strengthen the Acquia Network with these resources,” said Peter Guagenti, Vice President of Services at Acquia. “Acquia Network subscribers gain access to our tools, best practices, training videos from recognized Drupal experts, and the collective knowledge of Acquia’s technical team and partners.”

Ajit Sancheti, Co-Founder of Mu Dynamics, the company behind Blitz, praised the move. “Being integrated into the Acquia Network is further proof of the validity of Blitz for developers in need of performance testing. Acquia’s platform offers users a powerful set of capabilities to build websites. When combined with Blitz, application developers get the ease and flexibility needed to integrate performance testing into continuous integration without the addition of significant cost, time or complexity.”

About Acquia™, the enterprise guide to Drupal 
Acquia empowers enterprises with the open-source content management system Drupal. Co-founded by Drupal’s creator in 2007, Acquia helps customers manage their growth and scale their online properties with confidence. Acquia’s products, cloud infrastructure, and support enable companies to realize the full power of Drupal while minimizing risk, as it’s done for nearly 1,500 enterprise customers including Twitter, Al Jazeera, Turner, Intuit, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, New York Senate and NPR. See them at  http://showcase.acquia.com, and for more information please visit www.acquia.com or call 888.9.ACQUIA.

Phase2 Technology, based in Alexandria, VA, and SubHub, based in Cardiff, United Kingdom, have been collaborating on the initiative to achieve interoperability for Drupal apps and thus make it possible for any developer to write an app that would then be deployable across multiple app market implementations.

“Our goal is to make trying out, adding, or removing Drupal functionality simple for site users,” said Jeff Walpole, CEO of Phase2. “Through partnership within the Drupal community, we’ve seen these aspirations become actualities in our own products. We look forward to seeing app marketplace growth match the pace of Drupal adoption world wide.”

“The ability to easily create and add apps enhances the usability of Drupal and therefore helps to make Drupal more accessible to a wider audience,” said Evan Rudowski, CEO of SubHub. “We view apps as being crucial to the growth of a Drupal economy, making it easier for developers and others to distribute, sell and profit from the functionality they build.”

The Open App Standard defines an app as a discrete package that solves a specific, well-defined task and can execute the task without the need for further coding or development. An app can then be added to a website to enable the specific feature or action.

SubHub launched its own app market in late 2010 for its subscription content platform built using Drupal. The SubHub app market includes apps for MailChimp, Google Analytics, content feeds, Disqus and YouTube.

Phase2 earlier this year launched an app console for OpenPublic, a Drupal distribution for public sector clients. The companies then formed a working group to compare their respective “app” implementations and to consider ways to ensure that apps might be made to be interoperable.

Discussions around the Open App Standard were facilitated by Robert Douglass of Acquia, a leading provider of commercial hosting solutions for Drupal. Douglass will make the public announcement of the Open App Standard to the Drupal community on 23rd August in a session at DrupalCon London.

About Phase2 Technology
Phase2 Technology designs and develops enterprise Drupal platforms for publishing and media companies, government and non-profit organizations. Phase2’s team of creative designers, business analysts, software developers, and project managers also are passionate contributors to the open-source community building several widely used Drupal distributions including OpenPublish, OpenPublic and Open Atrium. Find out more at Phase2Technology.com.

About SubHub
SubHub makes it simple for anyone to build their own money-making content website. Thousands of individuals and small businesses use SubHub to profit from their passions, publishing content to their communities and making money through subscription and membership. SubHub can be found at www.subhub.com. Developers can learn more about SubHub’s app market implementation at http://open.subhub.com

Confusing release announcement

As you can see, it’s either 7.5 or 7.7 or maybe 7.6?

Long story short, if you run Drupal 7.x, you should probably upgrade. Hopefully, we’ll see more clarity in future release announcements.

Here’s the full announcement (note the URL is 7.6 but the announcement says 7.7): http://drupal.org/drupal-7.6

This is an incredibly exciting time to be at Acquia. Since the series C last November, our staff size has almost doubled, from 70 to 130. We’re bursting out of our office space and will be moving to a bigger, 35,000 square feet office soon. We needed all those people to service our thousand-plus enterprise customers, and to plan for the future with new initiatives, such as Dev Cloud andthe newly revised Acquia Network. We broke revenue records in Q1 and Q2 this year, following an extremely successful 2010.

This is very positive news for Acquia and the Drupal community in general as it attests to how well grounded the product and it’s capabilities are.

To learn more about Acquia, visit their website: http://acquia.com/

Watch the video to get an idea of how Commons works or try it out for yourself on their demo site: http://commons.acquia.com/

For those who want to jump right in, there are two options. The free version can be downloaded from here: http://network.acquia.com/downloads/drupal-commons or you can investigate the commercially supported version that Acquia provides here: http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-commons-social-business-software

Either way, it’s great to have new options on the table for those looking to build an engaging social community with Drupal.