Aaron Winborn

Sun Microsystems recently launched another cool Drupal site: Sun Learning Exchange. The site enables Sun employees to easily publish rich media training content such as videos, podcasts, and documents to be accessed by all Sun employees and customers. Media can be rated, sorted, and tagged by site members and is automatically transcoded and hosted on LimeWire. The site was built with the help of our friends at Chapter Three. Sweet!

Computer and video game developer Electronic Arts (EA) is using Drupal for their upcoming shooter game called Battlefield Heroes. I'm not big on games, but their trailer looks fun so maybe I'll give it a try. It sounds like, for a change, I wouldn't repeatedly get killed by a ultra-skilled 15 years old ...

According to the trailer, they have big plans for their website. They want to use it to host a long-running territorial conflict meta-game. Curious to learn if that will be built in Drupal too.

In two weeks, 500 Drupalistas will come together in Szeged Hungary for this year's European DrupalCon. It will be the first Drupal conference in Central Europe. While that is a bit of an experiment, I'm excited by it as we get to preach and listen to new and different users. What is not to like about that?

Even if you can't attend or if you are not doing business in Central Europe, you should still sponsor. Why?

There is no denying that many Open Source conferences work by a different set of rules than traditional conferences. DrupalCon is one of them. Your sponsorship makes it possible for 500 people to get together, to get aligned, to plan, and to get actual work done. It directly enables them to add to Drupal's success. Furthermore, by setting them up for success, you're indirectly enabling tens of thousands of people world-wide. Everyone, including you, will benefit from the network effects. It would be short-sighted to only think of sponsoring DrupalCon as a means to generate direct sales leads for your business, wouldn't it? You should sponsor because you want to invest in Drupal's continued international growth and success, regardless of where you have setup shop.

Thanks to all the DrupalCon Szeged sponsors that get this!

I've been working with Gábor Hojtsy for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married with Zsuzsi, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding.

Drupal boys. From left to right: Kristof Van Tomme (DrupalCon Szeged organizer), me, Zsuzsi, Gábor and Kieran Lal (Drupal Association and Acquia).

More pictures are available in my photo gallery.

It was really wonderful to witness and take part in their wedding. We had a great meal and party on the river banks of the beautiful Danube. Congratulations and may you continue to love one another forever!

It is 08/08/08 today. The day they took PHP4 behind the barn and shot it through the head. The date of the official discontinuation of PHP4 -- even for security issues.

Unfortunately, as I predicted in April 2007, PHP4 is still more widely used than PHP5 is. According to the latest Nexen data, PHP5 has only a 33% install base after more than four years.

Drupal's success depends on that of PHP, and PHP5's slow adoption rate has certainly been annoying. Hopefully, we can all move forward together now. Drupal is ready for it.

If you still haven't upgraded to PHP5, today would be a good day.

Ben and I printed some Mollom t-shirts and we're going to ship some to people that contributed a Mollom plugin or that took advantage of the Mollom API in new or clever ways.

We've just sent some t-shirts to Mattias (Wordpress plugin), Tijs (PHP5 class), Markus (Joomla extension), Jan (Ruby library), Andy (Python library), Wim (summer intern) and more. Let us know if you integrated Mollom in your favorite tool or service!

We also set aside some t-shirts for people that write the best Mollom reviews or otherwise help us spread the word in new, clever or interesting ways ...

Recently, Google launched Google Insights. Like with Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Great for marketing people.

Below are some examples specific to Drupal ...

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In China, Wordpress is winning hands down. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In my home country, Belgium, Drupal is almost as strong as Wordpress but not nearly as strong as Joomla. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by country. Google uses the term 'search volume index' for these heatmaps, meaning that they normalized the data by the total traffic from each respective region. In other words, just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn't mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In the US, the west coast beats the east coast. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by city. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

The top search on Drupal -- great for marketing people. Breakout means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Last night, I was up until after midnight studying the submitted bids for the Drupal.org redesign. This morning I continued my evaluation at 6:00am. Why? Because tonight the Drupal Association will select the design firm that will be responsible for a redesign of Drupal.org.

Originally launched in 2001, and last redesigned in 2005, we have outgrown the current Drupal.org website. Based on the results of last year's State of Drupal survey (see also Drupal.org wishlist), the Drupal Association has made the Drupal.org redesign one of its top priorities. The goal of the redesign is to better serve the existing Drupal community, but also to better communicate Drupal's strengths and benefits for users that are new to Drupal. By improving the navigation, the design and the organization of the site, we hope to further expand Drupal's reach and to provide us better tools to communicate and collaborate.

Tiffany Farriss of Palantir, a Drupal shop in Chicago, did an excellent job leading the RFP process on behalf of the Drupal Association. She posted the RFP on drupal.org and reached out to world-class design firms, evaluated all bids based on 9 evaluation criteria, connected with some of the design firms by phone, reference checked portfolio clients, wrote a 7 page report for the Drupal Association, and more.

Tonight, the Drupal Association's Board of Directors will meet and Tiffany will present a summary and analysis of the proposals with a recommendation. If all goes well, a vendor will be selected and we can kick of the next phase of the Drupal.org redesign. The winning design firm will be invited to present their (preliminary) plans at Drupalcon Szeged. Attending DrupalCon Szeged will allow them to interview Drupal.org users and to get additional insight in our community.

Hopefully, we can also start making rapid progress with the Drupal.org upgrade to Drupal 6. That upgrade is currently blocked by modules such as the project module, used to power the bug and patch tracking functionality on Drupal.org. As a community we need to step in to help fix that problem or the Drupal.org upgrade will soon be in the critical path of the Drupal.org redesign. Not good. Nothing should stand in the way of a Drupal.org upgrade at this point. (Yes, I made the mistake to release Drupal 6 before Drupal.org was upgraded.)

Once we upgraded Drupal.org to Drupal 6, we should also start work on the Drupal.org wishlist items that are not covered by the Drupal.org redesign. Personally, I'm really excited about the idea of having a new and improved Drupal.org. Hopefully enough people step up to help -- either by offering their technical skills or by donating money to the Drupal Association. Just help!

As you might have read, Wim Leers (long term Drupal contributor) is a summer intern at Mollom. After 6 months of public beta testing, and after having blocked more than 5 million spam messages for more than 2,500 users, we're getting ready to open our doors for business. While Ben and I continue to focus on the spam classifiers and the various Mollom plugins, Wim is helping us to get ready for launch by implementing a payment system and more.

More details about our pricing structure will follow shortly, but as promised, Mollom will remain freely available for both commercial and non-commercial use. The free version of Mollom will be limited in volume and features though. We want as many people to benefit from Mollom as possible so our goal is to make Mollom free for at least 95% of our install base. In other words, the free version of Mollom will go well beyond meeting the needs of the average site owner. Like so, we hope to make a significant contribution to fighting the spam problem online. More details shortly.

We just got back from a one week family vacation in Houffalize, a small town in the Belgian province of Luxembourg.

No e-mail, no RSS feeds, no eyeballing on Drupal discussions, and no way to stay in touch with work for one week. No e-life. It's great to be able to spend all your time with your family: we hiked, we walked, we swam and more. Pictures of our vacation are available in my Houffalize photo gallery.

Now I'm back, the mail/work backlog seems to be as bad as I expected it to be. I'll be easing back into work over the weekend, but it might take several more days before I get on top of things. Stay tuned!

Every year, I try to communicate the "Drupal Zeitgeist" in at least one of my "State of Drupal" presentations. To help me capture the State of Drupal for my presentation at DrupalCon Szeged next month, I'd like to invite you all to take part in the State of Drupal 2008 survey that I created. The goal of the survey is to better understand our needs and to help prioritize our efforts. If you can't attend DrupalCon Szeged, don't worry; I'll share all results after the conference.

Now, fill out the survey and help shape the future of Drupal!

One of the things we're building at Acquia is a Drupal technical support center where customers can call for help with Drupal questions. We're busy setting up a phone system, a bug tracker, a customer tracking application, a knowledge base and more. We already have some great technical support people on board, but we're looking for more Drupal talent to staff our support center.

Specifically, we're looking for people that have the rare combination of mad Drupal skills (both Drupal configuration and Drupal development), a diagnostic mind, and what we call, the support DNA. Do you have what it takes and do you want to learn how to build a support center from scratch? Apply here.

Or be the first to refer someone who makes the cut, and we'll gladly mail you a check for $1,000 USD to $2,500 USD depending on the situation. See our technical support job page for details on our bounty program.

Last week was crazy. Six airplanes, three time zones, four different hotels, two rental cars, an Acquia Board meeting, two nights in a tent and ultimately, my mind blown at FooCamp.

Off to a meeting in a tiny little airplane. In line behind the big guys. Taken with my iPhone.

FooCamp is the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly. It is the mother of BarCamp, if you will. The people you get to meet at FooCamp are impressive, and the format (including the nightly campfires) really sets people up to talk, brainstorm and geek out. The result? A fire hose of new ideas and a lot of new friends. Thanks Tim!

Joi Ito took this picture of me so I had to take one of him. Joi is CEO of Creative Commons, and is (or was) on the board of Technorati, ICANN, Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and much more. He is also an early stage investor in Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, and other internet companies.

Just like last year, I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the Foos are using Drupal, planning to use Drupal, or even evangelizing Drupal. More good stuff comin'!

More photos in my FooCamp gallery.

Each year around this time, I share the download statistics for Drupal core (see also: 2006 statistics and 2007 statistics). In other words, time for this year's update.

The last 12 months, from July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal core was downloaded more than 1.4 million times. The year before, from July 2006 to June 2007, Drupal core was downloaded 620,000 times. The number of downloads doubled in one year's time! And while Drupal 5 continues to be popular, the Drupal 6 core download is already a lot more popular.

These numbers do no include betas, release candidates or CVS checkouts. Also, we can't track downloads from mirrors, such as various Linux distributions, nor can we track installations through control panel software for hosting like cPanel or Plesk. Contributed themes or modules are not included in these numbers: we only looked at Drupal core.

Right on the heals of the Wordpress plugin for Mollom, Markus Bopp got his Joomla extension for Mollom accepted into the official Joomla Extension Directory. It is great to see Mollom being adopted by more and more platforms. Thanks Markus!

When people sign up to protect their website against spam with Mollom, they are asked to categorize each of their sites. So far, almost 2,000 Drupal sites have been categorized. The available categories are: a company website (22%), a site built for a customer (7%), a non-profit website (27%) or a personal website (44%).

Based on a sample of roughly 2,000 Drupal sites that use Mollom.

It is only one data point and a relatively small sample so I don't know if it is safe to generalize, but I figured it was an interesting nugget that could help us understand Drupal's install base.