Dries Buytaert

Mollom blacklisting and language detection APIs

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that Mollom is a continual work in progress. By studying how people use Mollom, by listening to feature requests, and by examining the plugins that our software partners and others have made available, we've introduced new ways to interact with Mollom.

First, we're announcing support for blacklisting. We introduced two new methods: one based on detecting the presence of user-specified URLs, and another that detects specific phrases or keywords. In both cases, Mollom maintains custom, site-specific URL and text blacklists, and knows to search for the presence of these links or phrases when analyzing text for your site. We're adding support for this API to the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

Second, we've implemented a new method that detects the language of any given text. We currently support detection of about 75 languages and this new functionality allows our end-users to take action based on posting language. It could be used to help segment web postings into different forums by language, or to help moderate the languages spoken on your site, for instance. The language detection API is used by some of our customers, but probably won't make it into the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

We've got other new features that we're working on as well, and will introduce them as they're ready. In the meantime, I'm excited to see what our plugin developers do with this new level of control.

Drupal code sprint at FOSDEM 2010

Symbian using Drupal

The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization that stewards the Symbian platform, an operating system for mobile phones and smartphones. The Symbian Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. Today, their website runs Drupal.

Help Acquia help Gartner with social software report

You might remember that a while ago, Drupal was promoted to the 'Visionaries' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. For someone unfamiliar with all the social software vendors and projects, the choice can be overwhelming and Gartner's reports can carry a lot of weight in the decision making process. Drupal's promotion to the 'Visionaries' category was a big win for all of us.

The social software market is evolving fast, and in response Gartner is working on a presentation that compares all of the different social software players in the enterprise market, including open-source projects like Drupal. As part of that process, Acquia was invited to review the presentation and provide comments about the social software landscape and Drupal's success stories. These success stories are important to help Gartner position Drupal against its many competitors. We will also be having a followup meeting with Gartner for further discussion.

Gartner considers three different use cases for social software: (i) team collaboration software, (ii) community software and (iii) networking software. Each of these scenarios have different requirements and emphasize different features of social software. User profiles and group support seems to carry a lot of weight in their evaluations. In addition, for each of these use cases, Gartner considers two different deployment scenarios: (a) sites inside the workplace and (b) externally facing websites. This effectively creates a 3x2 matrix or grid.

To help prepare for our meeting with Gartner, and to help further Drupal's competitive positioning in the enterprise we're looking for good examples in each of those categories. Good suggestions? Post them in the comments of this blog post. Remember that Gartner is focused on the enterprise, so we're looking for examples in the enterprise that carry a lot of weight. Thanks for your help!

Drupal Association 2010 election

The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal community with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution. The current Board of Directors was elected almost a year ago, so it's election time again!

On March 1st, 2010 we will elect new Permanent Members to the General Assembly. The General Assembly wil then select our Board of Directors, who are responsible for oversight of day-to-day operations. All the details can be found in the Drupal Association's Statutes.

We are looking for people who aspire to become Directors on the Drupal Association's Board and who can provide leadership and experience to expand the reach of the Association and its activities. All current Board positions, except the President and Treasurer, are up for election, including Secretary, Legal Officer, Marketing and Communications, Infrastructure Manager, Fundraiser, and Events Manager.

The Association is also looking for new General Assembly members with skills in marketing, drupal.org webmaster coordination, project management and more. People interested in becoming a Permanent Members are invited to apply. While Permanent Members don't have the defined responsibilities of board members, membership implies a commitment to work for and promote the goals of the Association.

The Drupal Association is run by unpaid volunteers and we expect that our board members will spend a considerable amount of time working on Association responsibilities and obligations. If you think you're a good candidate, and you have the time it takes, find an existing Permanent Member to support your candidacy (i.e. find a supporter) and submit your application. Applications are due by February 22th and on March 1st, we elect the new Permanent Members and the new Board of Directors.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the comments, or to contact the Drupal Association.

Drupal Gardens launches in private beta

I have a pretty big update for you: we just launched Drupal Gardens into private beta. Since the first public Drupal Gardens demo at DrupalCon Paris, a lot of progress has been made. Today, we sent private beta invites to the first people that signed up to be beta testers, and if things go well, we'll send out a couple thousand more invitations over the next few weeks.

For those who received an invite, building Drupal sites just got easier. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal so you don't have to worry about installation, hosting or upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites. For those of you who would like to also test drive Drupal Gardens, you can sign up to request a beta on drupalgardens.com and we'll be releasing more registration codes during the next few months of beta testing. We'll run in private beta for a bit and then open up to a public beta as we get closer to a final launch in early spring.

At Acquia, one of our goals has always been to help spread the adoption of Drupal. Hence, we have decided to make Drupal Gardens available for free until the end of 2010. By the end of 2010 we hope to have built all of the important features that will enable organizations to create feature-rich, social microsites. Our current thinking is that after 2010, there will continue to be a free tier for smaller sites but that there will also be paid tiers for larger websites or those who want access to premium features. There is a lot of work ahead of us and we need your help in the Gardens deciding what to plant, what to water and what to weed. We (at Acquia) can't wait to hear what you've got to say!

From a technical point of view, I'd like to point out this is a "real" beta launch. Drupal Gardens is a gem in the rough, built on the Drupal 7 core - currently in an alpha release - extended with functionality such as a WYSIWYG editor (CKeditor), media management, a theme builder, and basic "query builder" (i.e. simpleviews) capability. We're working with the various module maintainers, and contributing back almost all of our development efforts to the Drupal community.

Architecturally, Drupal Gardens is built on the ideas of an open social web; we markup data with RDFa, we implemented single-sign on using OpenID as our identity layer, we integrate with third-party services, and we allow people to export the code, the theme and data that makes up their site. We'll be sharing more technical details as we make progress, but we like to believe it will be a hosted service "done right".

I'd like to thank our alpha testers who have provided us some great feedback so far, the team at Acquia for working hard to get to private beta, and for the community for all the work on Drupal 7. I look forward to more people having the chance to test out Drupal Gardens and seeing what grows!

Mercy Corps using Drupal

Mercycorps.org, the public website for Mercy Corps, is using Drupal. Mercy Corps is a humanitarian aid agency headquartered in Portland that works in over 40 countries worldwide.

Mercycorps.org just brought in more than $4 million USD for Haiti relief. They used the boost module to handle the tremendous flood of traffic that they received the last couple of weeks. Over $500K USD of the money was raised through Personal fundraising pages, which are nodes that donors create and then send to their friends. They had over 2,000 people sign up for Mercy Corps (Drupal) accounts and create Personal fundraising pages. The fundraising pages are still going strong and raising thousands of dollars for Haiti relief every day.

The site was built by their in-house web team with support from the Portland Drupal community.

Stories like this make me want to work on Drupal. It is absolutely rewarding to see that Drupal can help enable organizations like Mercy Corps. In addition to indirect help through Drupal, my wife and I have also made a monetary contribution for the victims in Haiti.