Drupal

The long anticipated release of Drupal 7.0 has come about today!

Drupal 7 represents over three years of work by thousands of open source contributors. It is the most powerful, flexible and easy to use Drupal ever. And, with the rapidly expanding Drupal developer community, it is easy to extend your Drupal website's functionality with any of thousands of free add-on modules.

To learn more, visit the Drupal 7 information page.

It really should come as no surprise that one of the biggest challenges in online retail is shipping. You want to ensure that your shipping charges are reasonable, so that you don't lose customers. On the other hand, those charges need to be fair to you, the retailer, who ultimately must pay the shipping company for its service. You don't want to lose a bunch of money on every transaction.

On May 19th, the first day of the annual Google I/O developers conference, Google came out with another break-through announcement to the web development world – web fonts would now be freely accessible through the Google Font API and the Google Font Directory. On May 20th, Drupal released a Google Fonts module that enables Drupal website developers and administrators to take advantage of these newly available web fonts. Time to market – about 24 hours.

And the list of high profile websites built on Drupal continues to grow. The latest entry is the South African Government's new official 2010 FIFA World Cup website. One can only imagine the amount of traffic that site will be handling.

On a related note, the Catholic Church in South Africa is celebrating the 2010 World Cup with a new media campaign called Church on the Ball.  Both site are worth checking out.

In last month's Google I/O 2010 conference in San Francisco, Chris Messina gave a presentation on the Open and Social Web, and the developments taking place to enable and facilitate the vision of the social web. You will find his presentation below. It is a bit long, but quite informative and interesting.

Recently, I was trying to explain the free economy, in general, and the economics of open-source software, in particular, to a friend who spent a number of years in the executive ranks of a fortune 500 corporation. Coming to the conversation, he brought his industrial era management mindset, which insists that perpetually giving value away makes little economic sense.

For those who couldn't attend DrupalCon San Francisco, here is a link to Dries Buytaert's keynote address: The State of Drupal. As always, it is filled with exciting news about new and ongoing developments in Drupal. Dries paints an optimistic picture for the future of Drupal, but also cautions the community against taking any of Drupal's success for granted. He urges the entire community to continue to contribute.