Dries Buytaert

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!

Microsoft and Drupal

Last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Microsoft and SpikeSource announced their intention to work together to certify a number of Open Source projects on the Microsoft Windows platform. According to the press release, Drupal is the first application that has been tested and certified for Microsoft Windows ...

Because I didn't know this partnership was in the works, and because it's not clear what this really means, I figured I'd let the story develop for a couple of days. It has since been picked up on a number of blogs and news sites, and I got a couple of inquiries about it as well. I guess now is a good time to share what I think about it.

First, Microsoft's willingness to work with Open Source applications to ensure that they work on Microsoft Windows Server with MSSQL and Active Directory support is great –- it helps us bring Open Source software to the corporate world. Microsoft's announcement brings credibility to Open Source software and validates Drupal as one of the leading Open Source CMS applications. That is a good thing.

Second, I've never been close to either SpikeSource or Microsoft's business but hopefully it won't stop with an announcement. It remains to be seen whether they live up their marketing drum. With the help of Larry Garfield we already started planning a redesign of Drupal's database abstraction layer. I'm curious to see if they'll contribute to that, and if they will help us add and maintain MSSQL support in future versions of Drupal core. In the Open Source world, contributions speak louder than press releases.

Drupal is a Webware 100 winner

The Drupal community deserves a lot of praise for their hard work and dedication, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Drupal is a CNET Webware 100 winner in the publishing category. Good job team!

This is what CNET has to say about the results in the publishing category:

"Publishing had no mass consumer brands in the top 10, as most of the other categories did. WordPress got the most votes. I was interested to see the Drupal CMS platform placing high in this category -- above the consumer-oriented publishing products Typepad and Vox. Even combined, these two Six Apart services didn't come close to winning the same number of votes as Drupal."

Drupal Pro book cracks Amazon Top 100

About a week ago the new Pro Drupal Development book started shipping, and today, the book cracked the Amazon Top 100. And we're not talking about the top 100 computer books here, we're talking about the top 100 bestsellers.

I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive, and rumor has it that Apress, the publisher, already started making arrangements for a reprint.

That ranking might be short-lived but still ... can someone tell me what is going on here, because this is just plain nuts. I didn't expect that to happen either ...