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It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.

First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay (see screenshot). Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.

Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.

My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!

A lot of Drupal people and organizations help promote Drupal. At Acquia, we also like to help with promoting Drupal. One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work is carried out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several analyst calls myself. As a result of that work, Gartner. has included Drupal into some of its Magic Quadrant reports, and was most recently promoted to the 'Visionary' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.

Last year, Gartner classified Drupal as a 'niche player', meaning Drupal does well in a segment of a market, but that we had limited ability to innovate or outperform competitors. In this year's report, which was released last week, Drupal was promoted to the 'visionaries' category right next to Google and other big players. According to Gartner, visionaries align with Gartner's view of how a market will evolve, but they have yet to deliver against that vision.

Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about Drupal's pomotion: "Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support."

Why does this matter? As most of you know, there are hundreds of web content management systems and not everyone has the time or skill sets to figure out what system to use. Plus, large organizations that are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt.

This is exactly why I started Acquia, and how Acquia can add value to the Drupal community. You might notice that neither Joomla! nor Wordpress are to be found on this graph, and that is probably because they have not been able to position themselves with analyst firms. By maintaining relationships with all of these analysts, and showing them all the great work we have done, we can get Drupal to the next level in terms of enterprise adoption. Needless to say, this is a big deal for all of us in the community, as it provides tremendous validation for Drupal, and will create more business for everyone in the community.

Big, exciting news! The flag ship website of the U.S. government, Whitehouse.gov, just relaunched on Drupal. This is a big day for Drupal, and for Open Source in government, and something all of us in the community should be very proud of.

First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama's push for an open and transparent government -- Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

Second, this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal. It takes time to understand these things and to bring this change, so I congratulate the Obama administration for taking such an important leadership role in considering Open Source solutions.

Being one of the world's largest consumers of computer software, the U.S. government is not new to Drupal. Several agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration have been using Drupal, for example. Drupal adoption is growing rapidly within the U.S. government. However, Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal goes above and beyond any other Drupal installation within the U.S. government, and is a fantastic testament for Drupal and Open Source. It will raise awareness about Drupal across the U.S. government, and across all governments world-wide.

Personally, I'm thrilled by the idea that Drupal can help governments provide greater transparency, higher velocity, and more flexibility.

Disclosure: my company Acquia was involved in the development of Whitehouse.gov in partnership with General Dynamics Information Technology, Phase2 Technology, Akamai, and Terremark Federal Group. Additional details can be found in this TechPresident post (PDF version).

Eén (Dutch for 'one'), a public TV station reaching millions of people in Belgium, redesigned its website using Drupal: see http://een.be.

Lucas Arts, the video game company of George Lucas, launched a stunning Drupal site for its upcoming MMORPG: Star Wars, The Old Republic. Check out the website at: http://www.swtor.com. The Force is strong with Drupal! PS: in 2006, the Lullabots and myself visited Skywalker Ranch, the private workplace of George Lucas, to get some lightsaber training.

A couple of weeks ago, Robbie Williams made his comeback on British television music talent show The X Factor, where he performed his new single "Bodies" for the first time live.

With his comeback also comes a website refresh using Drupal: see http://robbiewilliams.com. The site was developed by an Acquia partner based in the UK.

I will be speaking at MIT on Monday, October 26 at 5pm in the Stata Center in Cambridge. I plan to talk about the state of Drupal, Drupal 7 and Open Source development in general. After the presentation, there will be some time for social networking. The event is free so you're all invited to attend!

On a somewhat related note, we have some intern positions open at Acquia to give people the opportunity to come and learn about Drupal -- students from MIT, Harvard or other universities interested in an internship at Acquia should certainly attend and approach me about it.

Yes, he has space shuttles on his underwear.

We're on a roll with universities using Drupal! Portland State University (PSU), with more than 24,000 students, is using Drupal for their main website at http://pdx.edu.

Strayer University, with more than 44,000 students enrolled at over 70 campuses, is using Drupal on http://strayer.edu.

Earlier this afternoon, I blogged about Stanford using Drupal. Well, if Stanford isn't enough for you, check out the main page for Duke University, recently redesigned using Drupal.

Most universities have had dozens of Drupal sites at the departmental level for some time now, but now it seems like Drupal is starting to graduate from the departmental level to the main site. Last week, I already blogged about how Rutgers University started using Drupal for their main site. More evidence that Drupal is starting to become a serious contender in the enterprise, and that more and more organizations are starting to standardize on Drupal.

It is great to see corporations, universities and governments endorse and adopt Drupal on a global scale!

I've been around the web long enough to know a good-looking site when I see one -- http://shc.stanford.edu is a good looking site. It is the home page of the Stanford Humanities Center, and it uses Drupal.

And there is more. A quick glance at https://techcommons.stanford.edu/topics/drupal/sites-using-drupal-stanford reveals a list of over fifty Drupal sites currently active at Stanford. As far as I saw on the ones I clicked on, each site is different.

This trend isn't specific to Stanford. We see it at MIT, Harvard and many other universities. More and more universities start to embrace Drupal. At many of those, Drupal is slowly becoming the de facto platform for web development. It is an emerging trend, and one that introduces a lot of students to Drupal.

Anyone who reads the news knows that Reuters is a major news agency; in fact, it is the world's largest international multimedia news agency.

It's also clear that Reuters is very interested in experimentation with "new media". They have established http://labs.reuters.com to package and highlight some of their technical innovations. Labs.reuters.com has an iPhone application, experimental social and community APIs, lots of semantic experimentation, and even a really neat "Face Search" application. The neatest thing, though, is that it runs on Drupal 6.

Let's think through this again. The world's largest international news agency uses Drupal to highlight the innovative features and applications they think they may want to deploy in the future. I don't know about you, but I like the way that sentence sounds.

We had our very first apple picking experience today. We went to Russell Orchards and saw a 1000 pound pig (no kidding, the biggest pig I have ever seen), picked apples, ate some amazing home-made cider donuts, played in the play garden and took a hayride. Couldn't have been any nicer!

The Acquia leadership team in October 2009. From left to right: Kent (support), Jay (co-founder), Bryan (marketing), Warren (sales), Lynne (marketing), Chris (engineering) and myself. Unfortunately, Tom (ceo) is missing from the picture, because he took the picture.

Growing is learning to climb bigger mountains, so at the latest Acquia Leadership Off-site, we decided to climb an actual mountain!

Cable news network CNN just released CNNgo.com into beta, fully developed with Drupal. CNNgo is a guide to six of Asia's greatest cities. What is interesting about the site is that they are looking to complement their professional editors with local bloggers, opinion makers, and the very people that form the soul of these cities.

As a traditional publisher, you have to figure out how to turn audiences into participants because it opens the doors for better advertising and new monetization opportunities. I think CNNgo.com is a great example of how companies like CNN can use the power of Drupal to implement a social media strategy through an add-on site.