Drupal

Yahoo FInanceTuesday, May 15, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite SuiteWorld 2012 -- NetSuite Inc. (N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced that leading technology innovators have embraced the NetSuite "Commerce as a Service" (CaaS) initiative and the new NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform, delivering next-generation commerce solutions and integrations that enrich the platform with valued-added functionality such as social ratings, reviews and conversations, social CRM, product data and image syndication, personalized product recommendations, rich media management, mobile device payments, and credit card payment processing. NetSuite "Commerce as a Service" (CaaS) enables businesses to manage their interactions with other businesses and directly with consumers via a cloud platform that delivers a desired customer experience, via any current device, directly on the core NetSuite ERP/CRM business management application. At the heart of CaaS is NetSuite SuiteCommerce, a new commerce-aware platform that provides a central system to manage all transactions with consumers and other businesses regardless of touchpoint (website, smart phone, tablet, or social media site).

These landmark partnerships between NetSuite and disruptive technology providers that are helping reshape commerce, such as Square, Stripe, Acquia, Bazaarvoice, GoDataFeed, MyBuys, Shotfarm and Velaro, strengthen the CaaS initiative and the SuiteCommerce platform, which combines a state-of-the-art Web storefront with a central system to manage all B2C and B2B transactions across any touchpoint, including websites, smartphones, tablets, social media and physical point of sale (POS). Operating directly on the core NetSuite ERP/CRM business management application, SuiteCommerce is designed to address the limitations and complexity of first-generation commerce systems to enable merchants to streamline business processes, build relationships with built-in marketing tools and immerse customers in a richly interactive and intuitive shopping experience.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/innovative-technology-leaders-show-support-1650009...Tags: NetsuiteAcquia PartnershipSocial business softwareCRM experiencesSaaS

Search CIOWednesday, May 9, 2012

Michael Le Du and his development team have become rather successful at getting beautiful women to share pictures of themselves. In fact, they make it look easy. Lest there be some misunderstanding, there's nothing untoward happening here -- just a little website redesign.

Le Du is chief technology officer at New York City-based Maxim magazine, which is published by Alpha Media Group Inc. Here, the good-looking gal next door is good for ROI. He is one of a growing number of IT leaders rethinking their website design strategies as business and customer needs continue to shift to a consumer-friendly, mobile-app-centric world.

In January the popular men's lifestyle magazine relaunched its website with an eye toward an enhanced mobile user experience and back-end agility. Le Du successfully got Maxim off its legacy content management system and onto an open source CMS in partnership with Acquia Inc., a commercial open source software vendor for the Drupal open source Web development platform.

App dev a way to improve user experience
"Hometown Hotties" was part of Maxim's ambitious three-month website redesign. The "hotties" also happen to be a good example of the growing importance of mobile app dev in enhancing the user experience. What's good for the user is good for the business.

Hometown Hotties is a longstanding Maxim feature. Essentially, women submit images and information about themselves from any device. Site users vote for their favorites, and the women with the most votes move on to increasingly competitive rounds until a favorite is chosen and becomes a Hometown Hottie. The winner becomes a spokesperson for Maxim -- which wins too, in that it gains new promotional options... Read more.

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240149947/Mobile-app-dev-at-heart-of-websi...Tags: MobileMobile AppMobile Developmentmobile webdesign

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 20 minutes Monday, May 7, 5:00 PDT (May 8, 00:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to upgrade our single sign on system. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

Sites will remain functional for the majority of the scheduled downtime, but everyone will be logged out. You may not be able to log into sub-sites for a few minutes as the update is rolled out.

Business InsiderThursday, May 3, 2012

GrowthBusiness sits down with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert to find out when the platform really started to take off and how the inventor-cum-entrepreneur is planning on monitising Drupal through open source software company Acquia.

http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/the-entrepreneur/lessons-from-an-entrepreneur/21...Tags: dries buytaertopen sourcegrowth business

Drupal 7.14 is now available, which contains bug fixes as well as fixes for security vulnerabilities from Drupal 7.13.

Drupal 6.26, which fixes known bugs (no security issues) is also available for download.

Download Drupal 7.14
Download Drupal 6.26

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 7 is recommended.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories, and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 and 6 include the built-in Update status module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

Bug reports

Both Drupal 7.x and 6.x branches are being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.13 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 7.14 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.12 and 7.14 releases can be found by reading the 7.14 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Drupal 6.26 only includes bugfixes.

Security vulnerabilities

Drupal 7.13 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:

• SA-CORE-2012-002

To fix the security problems, please upgrade to Drupal 7.13.

What is included with each release?

We made two versions of Drupal 7 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.13) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.14). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.

Known issues

- #1558548: Notice: Undefined index: default_image in image_field_prepare_view() - Upgrading from Drupal 7.x to Drupal 7.14 will yield a harmless but annoying PHP notice. Patch has been committed to 7.x-dev, and will be available in 7.15. A workaround in the meantime is visiting the field settings page and saving.
- #1541792: Enable dynamic allowed list values function with additional context - This issue introduced an more context to hook_options_list(). However, because Entity API was calling this hook directly it causes errors such as Warning: Missing argument 2 for taxonomy_options_list() in taxonomy_options_list() (line 1375 of modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.module).. Fixed in Entity API module at #1556192: Incorrect invocation of hook_options_list().
- #1171866: Change notice for: Enforced fetching of fields/columns in lowercase breaks third-party integration - This issue accidentally introduced an API change that affected both Migrate and Backup and Migrate modules. Solution for Migrate is to rename tables in scripts back to their proper names. Solution for Backup and Migrate is at #1576812: Could not complete the backup.

CIO JournalTuesday, May 1, 2012

IBM’s recent decision to replace its Oracle Siebel customer management system with SugarCRM’s web-based application is a big vote of confidence in commercial open source software.

Commercial open source software can be appealing to corporations because it often includes legal protections, quality controls and customer service. It has been used by startups such as Eucalyptus, which provides software for private clouds, and Acquia, which provides service and support for Drupal open-source content management systems.

The combination of open source code and quality controls helps companies such as SugarCRM compete with much larger rivals such as Oracle and Salesforce.com, which sell software based on proprietary standards.

http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/05/01/ibms-sugarcrm-deal-is-a-sweet-sign-for-comme...Tags: Open sourceopen source softwareDrupal

Business InsiderWednesday, May 2, 2012

Acquia has a famous founder and is the go-to company for millions of web sites.

Company: Acquia
Location: Burlington, MA
What it does: The support and hosting arm for companies using Drupal. Drupal is a popular free, open source content management systems used to build websites.
Founded: 2007
Funding: $38.5 million
Why it's hot: Drupal was written by Dries Buytaert when he was college and it organically grew into a massively popular CMS today.

http://www.businessinsider.com/17-enterprise-startups-to-bet-your-career-on-2012...Tags: AcquiaStartupBusiness Insider

The call for papers is still open for DrupalCon Munich -- but only until May 11!  Trainings too! The DrupalCon content team is looking for sessions that cover pushing the boundaries of Drupal and its increasing use as a cross platform system. Help shape what is presented at DrupalCon with this year's theme, "Open Up! Connecting systems and people."

Any proposals for sessions should fit within one of the following tracks:

• Coding and Development
• Community
• Design and Theming
• Business and Strategy
• Site building
• DevOps

To learn more about each topic, view the Session Track page. Here you can find out the anticipated audience and the topic focus, as set forward by each track chair. Selected Sessions and Trainings will be announced May 29.

Curious to learn how sessions are selected at DrupalCon? Learn more about the session selection process.

Core conversations will open for submissions on May 29, read more about Core Conversations on our website.

We are also inviting all organizations with training experience to submit proposals for the Pre-Conference Trainings, to be held on Monday, 20th August 2012.

Open Up - submit your session before May 11!  We look forward to seeing you in Munich August 20-24. Join the Drupal community in Europe this summer and register now for early-bird pricing.

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 13 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2012. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are investing over $72,000 in the Drupal project.

As always, we had many more projects that we would have liked to accept than we were able to. The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list.

Drupal will benefit from microdata support for contrib field types, help topic module for documentation team, sales reports integration for drupal commerce, materialization plugin support for views, search api statistics etc.

If you would like to keep up to date on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2012 working group and help out in whatever ways you can.

Here's to another great summer! :)

Application Student Mentors Auto Tagging Articles using Semantic Analysis/ Topic Modelling Arjun Kapur Matt Chapman Enhancing Feedback module (D7) Manu Chaudhary Alex Weber Enhancing Secure Code Review Module Udit Jaggi Michael Hess Extend microdata support to contrib field types Anca Dumitrache Lin Clark Help Topic module for the Drupal Documentation Team and for the help system temaruk Jennifer Hodgdon Improving RESTful Web Services Sebastian (sepgil) klausi Materialization Plugin for Views Dhruv Baldawa Janez Urevc Phone / SMS / VoIP integration with Drupal Commons nitech Leo Burd Port Og_panels to D7 and Improve Message notify to make it the source of email notifications sanjay rohila ezra-g Preparing Menu Block Module for Drupal 8 Core Chad Whitman Dave Reid and John Albin Wilkins Sales Reports for Drupal Commerce Christophe Van Gysel Daniel Wehner Search API Statistics Michael Timofejev Thomas Seidl Translation Management Tools Server Sebastian Siemssen Miro Dietiker

Search Manufacturing ERPWednesday, April 25, 2012

The explosion in open source computing and cloud computing options has created a new level of thinking in the design of enterprise process execution and how these processes use -- or simply integrate with-- traditional and proprietary software. So-called Tier 2 computing, which combines the on-premises applications traditionally used to execute business processes with cloud-based applications, is also gaining acceptance, particularly where formal operations are temporarily needed (such as mergers and acquisitions) or user levels have not achieved critical mass to deploy a full instance of an application. Enterprise social business tools sit at the crossroads of these trends.

With enterprise social business tools, organizations can leverage the collaborative effects of having processes executed within their “four walls” or throughout their value chain in either a cloud-based or on-premises environment, using either a proprietary or open source platform. Key organizational functions such as purchasing, supplier management and product development appear to be good candidates for enterprise social business. Early results look promising.

Open source computing options for collaboration

I recently had the opportunity to drop in on the DrupalCon 2012 event in Denver. Drupal is an open source computing platform that allows for a number of enterprise-wide activities to be executed in a secure and structured environment. To date, larger traditional platforms that are widely used for program microsites and collaboration--such as Microsoft SharePoint--and enterprise data management (EDM) platforms, such as Oracle mySQL, provide ready-to-use application program interfaces (APIs) to Drupal and other components of a Linux application management process commonly referred to as LAMP.

Bryan House is the vice president of marketing for Acquia, a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for Drupal, based in Burlington, Mass. In my recent interview with him, House talked about the open source options available for enterprise processes. “Some purchasing networks, such as the U.S. federal government, run very well on an open source platform,” he said. “Other functions we see taking advantage of this platform approach include new product development, resource management and case management.”
Case management in this sense refers to a combination of enterprise content management (ECM) and passing files from one party to another using workflow, and is most often employed in health services organizations. One example of case management is California’s HealthNet, which uses the Alfresco ECM system. According to House, Drupal takes the metadata and taxonomy from Alfresco and then handles the approvals and document routing.

Enterprise social business tool adoption trends

Some proprietary enterprise social business platforms are also growing in use. Jive Software, based in Palo Alto, Calif., recently announced a number of APIs in support of its Jive 5 release. Even traditional ERP companies are taking advantage of Jive to develop marketing programs. The America’s SAP User Group is a longstanding Jive customer.

However, the idea of porting to an open source model, where according to House “you can download a complete copy of your application system, anytime, anywhere,” is compelling. Given a secured environment, even regulatory management processes--such as HIPAA compliance for health systems--can be executed safely using open source.

In the end, combining cloud, on-premises, open source, and proprietary platforms is a question of the organization’s culture, resources, finances and needs. “The biggest thing in the software social business space is the flexibility that an open source platform such as Drupal provides,” House explains. “The amount of heavy lifting in each of these [open source] proprietary tools, like Jive, simply becomes unsustainable in terms of cost and effort.” (Both Jive Software and SAP were unavailable for comment.)

My own experience suggests that user adoption is affected by a combination of many factors that depend on a person’s position and perspective in the organization. Executives will want to preserve transparency and cost structures, while developers will focus on ease of integration and reusable code. For any new technology, adoption should come in risk-managed and well-defined envelopes so that organizations can learn to walk before they run. Where they run--and how fast they run--is up to each organization to decide.

http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240149119/Companies-turning-t...Tags: open sourceenterprise social softwarebryan house

Growth Business UKTuesday, April 17, 2012

Describing himself as an academic at heart, Dries Buytaert never thought of charging people for the system that now sits behind one in 50 websites. GrowthBusiness finds out how he’s monetising Drupal while staying true to its open source principles.

It’s a scene familiar from movie screens: a Red Bull-guzzling university student programming away into the small hours on a venture destined to change the world.

However, for Dries Buytaert the hours spent burning the midnight oil during his final year of a Masters degree have turned his hobby into a business that is now powering 2 per cent of global websites.

Drupal, an open source content management system, was devised by the Belgian national to allow users to build websites with functions such as blogging and RSS feeds. Like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Buytaert began with modest ideas about the potential of the tool he was creating.

‘I initially wanted to build a message board to exchange messages with my friends,’ Buytaert says. ‘I set out to work on it for a couple of nights, but ended up developing it for a number of years.’

Having started Drupal in 2001, Buytaert spent the next six years honing his platform, in between dipping back into academia to complete a PhD in computer science, and a quick stint at a software start-up in Belgium.

Critical mass
It was then that all the work began to pay off. ‘I remember one day, I think it was 2006 or 2007, when all of a sudden MTV UK started using Drupal, and then NASA started to as well. That was a personal moment, it felt like additional responsibility,’ he adds.

However, Drupal still hadn’t made Buytaert a penny. Its widespread adoption was driven by the fact that it was, and is, open source, and Buytaert refers to the ‘community’ of developers who use and add to the system. Drupal users have doubled in number each year, and it now has 1.5 million unique users per month.

‘I think open source is changing the way websites are being built, and it’s having a massive impact on the web. It’s a way of democratising the internet,’ Buytaert claims.

This was all very well, but Buytaert still didn’t have a way of turning his ‘passion’ into a full-time job. Together with Jay Batson, who founded successful unified communications company Pingtel (later acquired by Nortel), he founded Acquia in 2007.

Acquia was established to monetise the open source system that Buytaert had produced back in his university dorm, by providing products, services and technical support for Drupal.

‘For Drupal to get to the next level it needed to be successful in the enterprise, to help larger organisations use it: so that’s why we started Acquia,’ he explains.

Acquia’s UK base is in Oxford. ‘I guess I’m an academic inside,’ says Buytaert. ‘We want to attract young, ambitious people, and university towns are the place to do that. It also keeps costs down not being in the big cities.’

Buytaert won’t disclose Acquia’s turnover or profit, but he says that fundraising for the company was on the agenda from day one for a couple of reasons. ‘Firstly, we wanted to take advantage of the fact that Drupal was already established globally in order to monetise it on a worldwide scale.

‘Secondly, the kind of company that we are building is relatively human-intensive. We are in the business of providing commercial-grade support 24/7, and it takes more than just a handful of people to do that well.’

Buytaert and Batson started with a trip to Boston, Massachusetts, pitching to a group of carefully selected VCs who matched what Acquia was looking for.

Bigger appetite
For Buytaert, the difference between American and European venture capitalists is one of scale. VCs in the US have deeper pockets, as well as a desire to stay with an investee company for longer.

‘Also, the VCs we have worked with have much more operational experience than those we have met elsewhere,’ he adds. ‘All of them have been CEOs of several companies and experienced several exits.’

Following on from Acquia’s $7 million (£4.4 million) Series A funding round, which included the likes of North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners, the business has gone on to raise a further $31.5 million in growth capital. Its Series D round in July 2011 netted the company $15 million.

The process of raising funds is one that Buytaert says ‘took a lot of work’. To prepare for the Series A round, he surrounded himself with people who brought business experience to the company.

‘Building a company is all about building the right team,’ he says. ‘The best thing I’ve done is recruited a talented team of people with the right attitude, passion, integrity, knowledge and aptitude – and who are smarter than myself.
‘By surrounding myself with them I have learned a lot about building an enterprise business, and continue to learn to this day.’

Another benefit of investing early in manpower is that Buytaert can afford to take the occasional few weeks off while the business continues to hum along.

‘It also allows me to change my focus on a weekly or monthly basis. Sometimes I find myself working on different projects, while other times I am doing a lot of sales and marketing,’ he says.

Building a successful technology business takes a careful balance of resources between product development and marketing. Drupal continues to host its DrupalCon community events, where numbers have now swelled from an initial gathering of 40 people in Antwerp back in 2005 to its last get-together of more than 3,000 people in Denver during March. ‘On any given weekend there will be maybe up to five different DrupalCamps around the world,’ says Buytaert.

World leadership
In Buytaert’s view, there’s a key difference between US and European start-ups when it comes to growth strategy. ‘I feel there is a belief in Europe that it is better to own all of the company, whereas in the US they want to go fast and are willing to give up more equity in order to grow fast.’

He points out, ‘In the US, people are ok with owning a smaller piece of something bigger rather than a bigger piece of something smaller.’

This strategic rationale ultimately has an impact on success rates, he says. The reluctance to seek outside funding leads to start-ups being ‘underinvested’ and missing out on opportunities.

However, being a web entrepreneur with global ambitions is much easier than it was ten years ago, he says. The world is ‘flatter’ than it used to be, meaning that it’s easier to reach a global audience; as a result, there is room for smaller start-ups that are still profitable and healthy.

Passing it on
Buytaert’s ability to see such opportunities is one of the reasons that he works with various start-ups as an adviser, giving them the benefit of the experience he has gained through building Drupal and going through four rounds of fundraising for Acquia. ‘I try to help them out with all aspects of their business, and it’s a very interesting process for me,’ he says, adding that he would like to try his hand at angel investing in future.

Another motivation for working with start-ups is that Buytaert wishes he’d had more help himself when building Drupal.

‘When I was younger, I underestimated the value of people in your life that you can go to with hard questions. It’s important for entrepreneurs to build up their networks so that they can call upon them when they need to.’ It’s another example of the ‘community’ ethos that is central to Drupal and which Buytaert clearly relishes.

Away from his work with Drupal, Acquia, and other people’s ventures, Buytaert is having a go at bootstrapping a business himself. His start-up, Mollom, is a tool that aims to filter out spam from website comments, forum posts and contact form messages.

With a much smaller team of five, Mollom is already a ‘profitable, healthy business’ that currently filters out spam on 50,000 websites around the world.

Help at hand
It sounds like Buytaert is a busy man, but he says his days (and nights) are less frenetic than they used to be, and he’s now in a position to enjoy family life.

All-night programming sessions and back-to-back conference calls are behind him now, and he is quick to acknowledge the role of the VC capital that Acquia has secured in restoring a modicum of free time to his existence.

The beauty of Buytaert’s dorm room discovery is that the community he has built will continue to contribute towards the evolution of the platform. Its members come from different countries and cultures, but they share the passion for open source that he possesses. That’s why he isn’t overly worried about competitors.

‘We have thousands of people all around the world working 24/7 and being extremely passionate about it, often working for free. It will just blow the others away.’

http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/the-entrepreneur/business-leaders/2098958/dorm-r...Tags: dries buytaertopen sourcecontent management system

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, git.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 45 minutes Thursday, April 19, 5:00 PDT (April 20 00:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to upgrade our backend media servers. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

NOTE: During this downtime window, we will also disable access to the git repositories via SSH. The git:// protocol will still be functional.

Back in 2009, Groups.Drupal.Org (GDO) went through a major transition including upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, a redesign, and adding new maintainers. We are currently in the process of a similar transition. The site has already gone through a redesign, and as we make plans to transition to Drupal 7, we will also be moving to new maintainers for the next year.

Making it easier to contribute to GDO

Between the Drupal Association’s initiative to improve *.drupal.org, the community brainstorming on site improvements, and feature requests in the Groups.Drupal.Org issue queue, there is clearly a lot of interest in making improvements to GDO. However, for folks who want to roll up their sleeves and help by filing a patch, the path to replicating GDO for development purposes hasn’t always been clear. As a strategy for making it easier for anyone in the Drupal community to file a patch and streamlining maintenance efforts for the site, we have proposed that GDO will run the Commons distribution of Drupal for Drupal 7. Of course, this means that improvements made to GDO benefit sites powered by Drupal Commons and vice-versa, that generic improvements to Commons will benefit GDO.

New maintainers: Meet Ezra, Scott, and Justin

Helping with this transition, Ezra Gildesgame (ezra-g), maintainer of Drupal Commons, is also now a maintainer of groups.drupal.org. Ezra is the technical lead for Drupal distributions at Acquia, has been contributing to Drupal for over 5 years, and also maintains the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD).

Our other new Groups.Drupal.Org maintainers are Scott Reynen (sreynen) and Justin Toupin (justin2pin) from Aten Design Group. Scott is Lead Developer at Aten and has been contributing to Drupal for over 5 years, including helping to organize the Denver group on GDO. Justin Toupin is CEO at Aten, and has been leading the organization’s involvement in Drupal since version 4.7.

Getting involved: How you can make GDO better

This process of upgrading Groups.Drupal.Org is an especially good time to get involved by joining a few different groups and queues:

• Commons related are the Commons group, and the Commons issue queue for bugs/ideas that affect all Commons sites.
• The GDO issue queue is for features and tasks specific to Groups.Drupal.Org.
• Groups to discuss the site: http://groups.drupal.org/maintenance and http://groups.drupal.org/groups-drupal-org

Note that Ezra, Scott, and Justin have agreed to work on the site for at least a year. If you think you might want to take over in a year, the best way to do that is to get involved working on the site in these issue queues.

Thanks, Greg & Josh!

This is also a great opportunity to thank Greg Knaddison (greggles) and Josh Koenig for their help maintaining Groups.Drupal.Org over the past few years. Josh and Greg found they were too busy with other projects unrelated to community site building which made it harder to find time for GDO (Josh building Pantheon and Greg working with Acquia’s Profesional Services Security Group and the Drupal Security Team). Greg and Josh hope that transitioning to people who spend more of their lives working on community sites will help GDO be an even more valuable collaboration platform for our community.

Hi friends. I'm hoping that you'll support another Drupal community initiative that I've recently dreamed up. All you have to do is add a /drupalgive page to your organization's web site.

Two organizations have published already at http://www.acquia.com/drupalgive and http://www.chapterthree.com/drupalgive. These pages are based on a design by Nica Lorber of Chapter Three. Feel free to reuse this design or just publish a plain listing page. It is better to publish a plain page than none at all. Or use the Feature at http://drupal.org/project/drupalgive.

A /drupalgive page highlights the great work that your organization is doing for the Drupal project. Not only does your organization receive credit for the work you do, but we also nudge other organizations to give back as well. I expect that employees and potential hires from non-contributing organizations will start demanding to give back. This initiative gives those folks something to point to when advocating and educating inside their organization.

Here are examples of appropriate and inappropriate items for a /drupalgive page:

Appropriate

1. A podcast educating folks about great Contrib modules.
2. A link to a significant patch review or commit on drupal.org.
3. A blog post about Drupalish wireframe templates that anyone can use.

Inappropriate

1. An announcement about your latest site launch (even whitehouse.gov).
2. A new video was added to your commercial video subscription service.
3. New features for your paid Drupal hosting service.

Your /drupalgive page should also emit an RSS feed at /drupalgive/rss. We'll add your feed to the new Planet Drupalgive (page, RSS). To get added to the feed, follow the Drupal Planet process. Lastly, please include a link to http://drupal.org/project/drupalgive so that folks can learn more about the initiative.

One simple way to build a /drupalgive page is to add a 'drupalgive' term to your site taxonomy and tag posts with it. Alias the term detail page to /drupalgive and you are done. An alternative is to create a dedicated content type for these entries and a simple View at /drupalgive will show the listing.

Please comment below and lend your support or provide other input.

Sand HillMonday, April 9, 2012

Quickly growing open source software company Acquia provides products, services and support for enterprises using the open source Drupal social publishing system. I spoke with CEO Tom Erickson about the hot trends today and how open source will impact enterprises in the next few months.

http://sandhill.com/article/acquia-and-drupal-experiencing-widespread-moves-to-o...Tags: acquiadrupaltom ericksonopen sourceopen source software

Public Service EuropeThursday, April 5, 2012

To many in the private sector, the idea of super-size contracts that are expensive to run and almost impossible to break free from seems ludicrous. Jim Shaw explains more...

http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/1761/european-public-services-must-fo...Tags: acquiajim shawopen sourcepublic services

Bojhan Somers and Roy Scholten are the Drupal UX Team leads.

We believe that Drupal 8 User Experience needs a lot of work to truly make all users of Drupal love what they are working with. We believe that by improving core, we improve the entire Drupal experience for everyone.

How are we doing this? By working with core initiatives, providing ideas, sketches, wireframes, detailed designs, and actively engaging in discussion. D7UX taught us a lot of hard lessons, we now know how to communicate our design rationale more clearly, maintain a UX vision throughout the maze of issues, and empower developers.

What are we working on? We are working on a few initiatives; mobile, blocks & layouts, multilingual and leading a lot of smaller efforts around improving our content authoring and site building experiences.

Drupal 8 design progress so far Content creation

Our content creation experience is still far from being great, but we have been improving the content creation experience from all angles. We have received lots of feedback on our proposals, and iterated with the community on various parts of this experience.

• Research on a interaction model for the content creation page
• Redesigning the Create Content page
• Find content iterations

We have now finalized most of our research activities and we want to start implementing a few of our major ideas. For this to happen, we need developers who want to improve this part of core.

There are two very actionable issues at #1510532: Implement the new create content page design and #1510544: Actual preview of content for you to help out on!

Blocks & Layouts

The blocks & layout initiative started by EclipseGC focuses on solving the messy experience of placing parts (blocks, views, panes) on the page. We believe this can be fundamentally better if we tackle it in core. This initiative will allow us to arrange and organize blocks into flexible layouts through a drag and drop interface. This initiative has many UX components, from finding the right blocks, to selecting the context, to creating mobile layouts.

We have done a lot of research the past few months to understand the space we are designing for. It’s incredibly complex, but will be a huge win if we can provide a great solution straight out of the box.

• Research on pages & components; what are the fundamental concepts?
• Research on context usecases; what are the primary use cases?

We will need help from everyone; developers, designers, user researchers, end users and business owners! Become part of the discussion in the Drupal 8 Blocks & Layouts everywhere initiative group.

UX team activities

UX team bi-weekly office hours

We started to hold bi-weekly UX "office hours" (next one will take place 16 April, 20:00 UTC, 4PM NYC, 4 AM Tuesday Singapore/Shanghai), where we will discuss recent activities of the team but also review contributed modules. This has resulted in modules such as Taxonomy Acces Control making major improvements.

UX team activity

The team has been busy in Q1 2012:

• Becky Gessler, Garen Checkly and Jen Lampton conducted a usability study at the Google offices, resulting in a detailed findings report and Drupalcon Denver core conversation talk on how to solve it.
• Lisa Rex, Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry), Erik Stielstra (sutha), Alexander Ross (bleen18) have done a total of 22 interviews about how people use the module page.
• Lewis Nyman has been working hard on designing Drupal’s mobile interface, resulting in interesting discussions around navigation, principles and actual implementation of ideas in the mobile issue queue.
• Roy Scholten (yoroy) has presented on Core product: 3 is the magic number and organised several sprints around UX at Drupalcon. There was also a BoF.
• Jared Ponchot has been contributing design proposals, to our effort to redesign the content creation page.
• Kristjan Jansen (kika), Jeff Noyes (Noyz) and Kevin O'Leary (tkoleary), Michael Keara (UserAdvocate) have put out various ideas around media UX, creating UI standards for add/edit flows, optimizing the content listing and research for the Blocks & layout initiative.

We have also released our ideas around redesigning the module page, adding a project browser to core, adding search everywhere, draft revisions and much more in the usability issue queue!

We need your help!

We need volunteers:

• Developers who can help us with the PHP, CSS or JS parts of these changes.
• New and experienced UX designers to work on the new features that we want to introduce in Drupal 8.
• A project manager who can help break down tasks, coordinate contributors, update blog posts and issues, and help the UX team & leads focus more on UX.

If you're interested in becoming a contributor to the UX Team in one of the roles above, contact Bojhan Somers and/or Roy Scholten.

You can find us in in the usability group, contact us directly by e-mail (or drupal.org contact form), join us on IRC in #drupal-usability, or find us in person at Frontend United.

The cool stuff we're working on

Still not sure? We we love a lot more help to pursue all these crazy ideas within the next 7 months:

• Improving the content creation experience. Discussion take place in our design proposal, and implementation is taking place in #1510532: Implement the new create content page design
• Layouts & Blocks initiative, building a drag & drop editor where you can place components, build layouts and manage pages. Discussions take place in the Layouts & Blocks group.
• Mobile administration, Drupal 8 should be great to use on any phone help us in making the administration mobile friendly. Discussions are taking place in the Mobile group

Thanks!

- Bojhan and Roy

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Yahoo NewsMonday, April 2, 2012

Acquia, the leading provider of commercial solutions for Drupal, has named Digital Bungalow an Enterprise Select Partner. For web development firms, this is the most distinguished partnership possible, made with just 16 firms globally. The partnership provides Digital Bungalow with the highest level of field assistance and support for their Drupal initiatives.

"We’re thrilled to be recognized by Acquia as one of the world’s leading Drupal development firms. Digital Bungalow developers are on the leading edge of custom Drupal development for websites, mobile, and eCommerce," said Nate Wolfson, President of Digital Bungalow. "We have recently built websites for Humana and Showcase Cinemas on the Drupal platform, and with the help of Acquia, we are able to streamline, customize and maximize our clients’ CMS capabilities."

“Digital Bungalow has become a valuable partner and Drupal advocate,” said Tim Bertrand, VP of Worldwide Field Sales at Acquia. “We look forward continuing to strengthen our partnership and the benefit that will bring to both organizations.”

Acquia's partnership with Digital Bungalow builds on Drupal's continued success. Drupal is one of the world’s largest, open-source content management systems that empowers non-technical users to easily update their website content. With nearly 14,000 contributed modules, developers can piece modules together to build an effective content management system, tailored to the needs of the client.

About Digital Bungalow
Founded in 1999, digital marketing and technology agency Digital Bungalow develops websites, custom applications, and marketing campaigns that drive business results for regional and national businesses. Clients include Bob’s Discount Furniture, Carrier Corporation, Dow Jones, Humana, and Showcase Cinemas. For more information, visit www.digitalbungalow.com or @DigitalBungalow on Twitter.

About Acquia™, The Enterprise Guide To Drupal
Acquia empowers enterprises with the open-source social publishing 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 2,000 enterprise customers including Twitter, Al Jazeera, Turner, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, New York Senate and NPR. See who's using Drupal at www.drupalshowcase.com and for more information please visit www.acquia.com or call 888-9-ACQUIA.

http://news.yahoo.com/digital-bungalow-named-enterprise-select-partner-acquia-14...Tags: AcquiaDigital BungalowDrupal

Hello from Jennifer, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team leader! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation team.

First off, I just want to remind everyone that I’m still planning to step down as Documentation Team Leader at the end of 2012. If you’re interested in becoming the co-leader or assistant leader now, and taking over at the end of 2012 as the main team leader, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/203258 for more information. It would be good to find someone soon!

Events

• The Documentation Team is currently holding weekly "Documentation Office Hours"—one-hour IRC meetings on Tuesday afternoon (North American time), open to anyone for questions and discussions about contributing to documentation. This schedule is likely to change soon; join the discussion about a new time for office hours.
• The API documentation cleanup sprint from last quarter has continued into this quarter. The goal is to bring the Drupal 7 and 8 core API documentation much more in line with our documentation standards. To join in, visit the issue page.

Milestones and Accomplishments

• Lots of content was updated on Drupal.org this quarter. Of particular note:
• There used to be a "Community and Support" link in the top navigation of Drupal.org; now there are separate Community and Support links, and the Support page has been completely redone (a redesign of the Community page is also in the plans). Hopefully this will help people new to Drupal connect with the help they need to get started. Thanks to Lisa Rex, David Hernandez, and others for making this happen!
• The Omega theme project organized a group to update the Omega section of the Community Documentation.
• The Media module project organized a group to update the Media documentation.
• An effort is underway to create a Mobile section in the documentation.
• We started a New Contributor Tasks section on Drupal.org. This is a place where people new to contributing to Drupal can go to find meaningful and doable tasks to start with. If you have ideas for the section, there’s a page describing how to add to it (with templates), and a suggestions page too.
• 712 different contributors made a total of 3976 revisions to documentation pages on Drupal.org. Wow! (I have a new statistics page that totals this up). Apologies if your project didn't make it into the list above -- there's a lot going on and I can't keep track of it all!
• Neil Drumm and I (with the help of other patch contributors) are continuing to make updates to the software for http://api.drupal.org. This quarter, there were major improvements to the linking and references features of the site -- check it out if you haven't been there lately! If you would like to work on the API module, check out the issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/api) or find jhodgdon in IRC to get oriented.
• I was given permission to commit Drupal Core 7/8 documentation and coding standards patches in February, and to help out in case of "Core Is Broken!!" emergencies. Hopefully this will lessen the burden on Angie, Nat, and Dries, freeing them up to concentrate on bugs that improve the Drupal software functionality.

Docs Infrastructure

Last year, the Docs Team (or at least its leadership) got a bit discouraged about Documentation infrastructure improvements taking quite a while to get deployed to Drupal.org. But now there's a new process for getting improvements deployed, and Neil Drumm is working on them with hours funded by the Drupal Association. So, I'd like to get us working on improvements to "docs infrastructure" (tools, navigation, etc. for Drupal documentation writers and users) again.

I started working on that this quarter, and several small things were deployed. That went well, so there are now more in progress. Two that we hope to get done soon are a Docs Team effort to have better navigation for Community Docs, and LoMo's project to replace the Books page with a content type/View. Join in the discussion and/or help out!

And as a preview, this summer I would like to really get working on the "curated docs" we've been talking about for a year or more... Watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for updates!

Next Steps

If you're interested in helping with Drupal documentation:

• New contributors: Check out the tasks in the New Contributor Tasks section, or read http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation to learn all about contributing to documentation. Or come to the weekly office hours (see Events section above) to ask questions and get started.
• Drupal Documentation announcements, discussions, and events are posted on http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team and on Twitter (@drupaldocs).
• API documentation cleanup sprint (for programmer-documenters): http://drupal.org/node/1310084
• Work on the API module: http://drupal.org/project/issues/api

Tech Week EuropeThursday, March 29, 2012

Red Hat has fulfilled its long-held ambition to be the first open source company to do a $1 billion in annual revenue.

The company, which provides servoce and support for Linux based systems to businesses, has been aiming for this goal for several years, but announced in a conference call yesterday, that it had finally beaten that barrier with 965.6m in subscription sales and $167.5m in services sales over its financial year, which ended in February.

Open source consulting is up
Red Hat’s growth was particularly high, with subscriptions and services up 25 percent and 23 percent respectively, said CEO Jim Whitehurst in a celebratory conference call.

Red Hat’s model of converting users of free software into paying customers has played well in the recession, and increasing government support for open source has worked in its favour.

And these are not small contracts. The conference call revealed that Red Had has done more than thirty deals greater than $1 million in the last year, and even has three $5 million deals.

The large deals tend to include Red Hat’s JBoss middleware, and its enterprise virtualisation product RHEV.

Red Hat has done well from the cloud, given that its business model allows easy expansion. At the same time as its earnings announcement, the company announced service level agreements for OpenShift, its platform as a service (PaaS) product.

Red Hat is very much the exception on open source companies, and smaller brethren gathered to pat it on the back: “This is a huge milestone for the open source software industry, and signals the coming of age for the OSS business model,” said Tom Erickson, chief executive of Acquia.

“Reaching the billion dollar mark is a major achievement for any organisation, and today’s news demonstrates that open source innovation can survive and thrive despite challenging economic conditions. This announcement is also a tribute to the limitless talents of the developer community, proving that a collaborative approach can deliver, not only innovation, but also spectacular results.”

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/red-hat-becomes-first-billion-dollar-open-s...