Last week it was Red Nose Day, a UK-wide fundraising event organized by Comic Relief every two years. A combination of television programs, local community events, social media and Drupal websites were used to raise £75 million ($113 million) in one day.
Today I'm excited to announce that we've released the next generation of Mollom - our Content Moderation Platform. For the past five years, Benjamin Schrauwen and I have worked hard to help companies stay ahead of the curve when it comes to content moderation.
This Saturday and Sunday, March 9-10, over 30 locations around the world will participate in Global Drupal Sprint Weekend, coordinated by Cathy Theys(YesCT). The sprint weekend is a grassroots initiative for people all over the world to get together and contribute to Drupal.
Last summer, a number of Drupal community members as well as key figures from other major open source projects met in Portland for the first-ever Drupal governance sprint. The proposal from that sprint recommended the creation of a number of chartered "working groups" to better formalize the existing governance of various aspects of the Drupal project, now that our community is at its current scale.
We just celebrated our two year anniversary of Acquia's expansion into the European market. It has been a phenomenal two years and as a result, we have grown to over 50 employees in Europe. Our UK office is bursting at the seams so we're about to move into our new digs in Reading. We also have a growing presence in the Benelux, France and Germany.
As of Monday, February 18, Drupal 8 feature completion phase has officially ended. Since December 1, the original code freeze date, we've managed to add numerous awesome features that were previously in-progress, such as:
I'm happy to announce that Lee Hunter has been appointed as the new Documentation Team Lead for Drupal. Lee has been a long term member of Drupal's Documentation Team, and has been a technical editor for thirteen years of his professional career. To read about Lee's vision for Drupal's documentation, please check out his announcement blog post.
Today is bittersweet for the Drupal Association, as Jacob Redding has transitioned the Executive Director role to Holly Ross. Jacob did a phenomenal job growing the Drupal Association, Drupal.org and Drupal as a whole. Jacob’s special attention to the community has helped create a culture that many of us are proud to be a part of; his passion and dedication for Drupal has always been evident.
When we first announced the Spark authoring experience initiative for Drupal in May of last year, we chose Drupal 7 as our target in order to develop the features and get them in front of testers as quickly as possible. After DrupalCon Munich in August, the team shifted efforts towards Drupal 8 core instead, in order to more directly improve the experience of Drupal itself.
Every week, I get asked the "Silicon Valley question". This week alone, it came up at least three times. I had a phone call with a Belgian start-up asking me for my thoughts on whether to start their company in Belgium or in Silicon Valley. This afternoon, iMinds, a Belgian research institute that promotes entrepreneurship, visited me at Acquia to talk about similar topics.
A major focus of usability efforts in Drupal core has been around making it easier to edit things on your site. In Drupal 7, we introduced the Contextual links and Overlay modules to make it simpler for content authors and site builders to jump directly to the parts of the administration that relate to the things they see directly on the page, such as blocks or menus.
In the summer, I announced that we would adopt Aloha Editor as part of Drupal 8. The primary reason was that Aloha was the only WYSIWYG editor that supported in-place ("true" WYSIWYG) editing; something we need to accomplish our vision for in-place editing. The Aloha Editor developers have been excellent in their attention to Drupal's needs.
If you've ever listened to one of my keynotes, you might have seen pictures of the Drupal bacon, Drupal socks, Drupal lager, or the infamous naked guy on a bike with the Drupal tattoo. Well, today I'm excited to tell you about the Limited Edition Drupal Bobblehead Toy. The perfect gift for your Drupal geek!
I'm proud to announce Acquia's newest member of the team, the LEGO Druplicon, courtesy of DataFlow (now ONE Agency). It all started on a hot August day at DrupalCon Munich. On that day, I stopped by DataFlow's booth to look at this amazing piece of art. Obviously I am a bit partial to the Druplicon and the innovative and creative ways people around the world are creating branding for Drupal.
For four years now I've been an advisor for Akiban, a Boston start-up building a new class of NewSQL/NoSQL database. I'm excited that after 4 years of hard work, Akiban launched their first Drupal customer solution in the Acquia Cloud. A great opportunity to talk a bit more about what Akiban is doing, and why I'm excited to help their team.
I'm pleased to announce that the Drupal Association's Board of Directors has appointed Holly Ross as its new Executive Director. Holly is a well-known visionary leader in the nonprofit technology community with a proven track record of developing and implementing organizational strategies that provide direct community benefit.
Since Drupal 8 opened for development in March of 2011, the Drupal core team has been hard at work, marching towards a feature freeze of December 1, 2012, just a few short days away!
I love attending events like BADCamp. Being here gives me a chance to connect with many people I've known for a long time, but I also get to meet new people that share our passion for Drupal.
