Dries Buytaert

Happy tenth birthday Drupal

Today is Drupal's 10th birthday. Drupal 1.0.0 was released on January 15, 2001. Now, ten years later, we've just released Drupal 7: our best, most flexible, and most user-friendly version yet. After ten years, we haven't lost any momentum.

It's amazing to look back and see how far we've come. To see how much drupal.org and its associated sites have changed and evolved is exciting. To see that we have an active Drupal Association with a paid staff dedicated to the project is wonderful. Drupal, ten years in, has officially become a phenomenon.

Ten years ago, I had no idea that Drupal would become what it has today or that it would become such a large part of my life. And yet, I'm as passionate about Drupal now as I was then. I know in my gut that it seems that we have reached a critical mass of momentum that feels unstoppable. I also know that I'm as committed to this project and to this community now more than ever.

I also know -- and this part is the most important -- that Drupal is not only about software. The software is just the tangible byproduct of something much more greater; the community. You are the key variable in this equation, and you are the reason for Drupal's success. The value of Drupal is that, as a community, we've become greater than the sum of our parts.

For your work over the last ten years, in making Drupal what it is today, I thank you all. For your future work, over the next ten years, I thank you in advance. Happy 10th birthday, Drupal!

First birthday Stan

Happy first birthday, Stan!

Happy ninth birthday Drupal

Exactly nine years ago, I released Drupal 1.0.0. When I shared my hobby project with the world, I expected no more than a dozen people to actually use it. It took a large community of people to make Drupal successful, but today, Drupal has hundreds of thousands of friends. Thank you to everyone who has been and is contributing to Drupal. Rock!

Second birthday Axl

Last year you still looked innocent. This year not so much. Welcome to the "terrible twos", Axl.

Happy belated first birthday, WP-Mollom

On his blog, Matthias Vandermaesen comments that his Mollom plugin for Wordpress was a year old on April 2nd of this year. At the same time, he announces the release of WP-Mollom 0.7.4 (which mainly includes some new translations), and lays out a roadmap for future development.

But what a difference a year makes. One year later, Mollom has blocked well over fifty million pieces of spam, and Matthias' Wordpress plugin is an important part of the Mollom ecosystem.

In his blog post, Matthias lays out a great set of feature enhancements and code refactoring in his blog post; like us, he's interested in optimizing his plugin code as much as possible. He's got lots of great usability ideas as well, and contemplates new features to integrate with the upcoming WordPress 2.8.

Matthias -- Happy Birthday to WP-Mollom. Let us know how we can help!

Drupal birthday cake

Because Drupal turned 8 years old last week, I got the Acquia team a special birthday cake. Pictures have since emerged so I'm sharing a couple of them here. Yum, yum!

Happy eighth birthday Drupal

Today, eight years ago, Drupal 1.0.0 was released! The following snippet is taken directly from the original announcement:

Today, drop.org announces the release of Drupal 1.00 after an extensive period of testing. Drupal is a full-featured content management/discussion engine using Apache/PHP/MySQL and suitable to setup a news-driven community or portal site similar to kuro5hin.org and slashdot.org. Current features include discussion forums, web-based administration, theme support, an open submission queue, content management, a modularized design, PHP sessions, user management with access control and username/profanity/hostname filters, error logging, a public diary module, an affiliate site module, backend/headline generation (RSS/RDF) and much more.

When I started work on Drupal as a graduate student, Drupal was just a little hobby project grown out of my own interest in the web. As you can tell from the original release notes, being the only programmer certainly had its charms. ;-)

Fast forward 8 years, and we're a global project with hundreds of thousands of users, thousands of active contributors and a healthy ecosystem. Along the way, I've always tried to listen to the community, and to trust my own instincts and moral compass. We built an amazing community together, and because of that, working on Drupal continues to be a labor of love. Even after eight years.

A big project can't always do what a small project can; there is more legacy and overhead, but nonetheless, I think what is important is that we stayed true to our initial values: innovation, collaboration and a healthy desire to keep the code as small and simple as possible. Happy birthday, Drupal!