In 2008, the University of Waterloo formed a committee to select a web content management system.

In March 2009, the selection was narrowed down to three CMS's, Drupal being the only Open Source one of them. The other two being RedDot by Open Text (a company headquarted locally in Waterloo), and Cascade Server by Hannon Hill.

Later RedDot was selected as the CMS of choice.

After over 6 years using and contributing to Drupal, one can see that Drupal is becoming more and more popular ...

Here are several events that I encountered in the past few weeks to this end ...

The Drupal security team receives reports of all sorts all the time.

Some of them are false positives by security scanning software.

Today we got a report about a Trojan being detected in Drupal 6.10 and 6.13 by TrendMicro OfficeScan version 10, in the following files:

modules/color/color.install - BQDR_IRCBOT.BZQ
modules/profile/profile-wrapper.tpl.php - TROJ_SWIZZOR.KXV
modules/translation/translation.module - TROJ_FRAUDLO.LL

Stephane Corlosquet (scor) is back from the RDF in Drupal 7 code sprint.

He has kindly agreed to present to the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group. He will tell us about the exciting things that were done in Drupal 7, and how this can change the landscape on the web.

More info at: Drupal, the Semantic Web and RDF.

Here is yet another example of Drupal being used as the basis of a custom "distro".

Ubuntu now has UbuntuDrupal which is used for the LoCo's (Local Communities).

Its original aim is to make Drupal easier to setup (which they describe as "painful") and run for these communities. They say that it has grown to be a "general development suite".

Here is where the code is on Launchpad. The numbering of the releases is confusing, since 6.2.0 does not correspond to a released Drupal version.

We all know that kittens get killed when you hack Drupal core.

But that is nothing? How about kitten torture?

Anyone Flash guru up for remixing that with Druplicon?

It is only fitting that someone from Washington DC gets to commit the 180,000th commit to the Drupal repository, during the code sprint at DrupalCon DC 2009.

Congratulations to Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed.

[Edit: Changed Jim to Jeff]

The "curse of the DrupalCon" continues ...

Which one? The fact that wireless is always an issue, perhaps at least in the North American DrupalCons of late.

At Boston, we had severe issues. Narayan Newton and David Strauss re-wired the conference to use the presenters' connection. That helped a bit, but if I remember correctly there was another issue after that (bandwidth, fake DDoS detection or something).

Now in Washington DC, the internet is still unreliable. Why you ask?

Here is why: The DHCP lease for the IP is very short: less than 5 minutes!

Look at this:

There was this post on Slashdot about Wordpress and Joomla! and which one is more usable.

Someone posted about Drupal using terms that we all in the Drupal community will like, e.g. "use Drupal!".

We always saw Drupal with a reputation of being "powerful but ugly", "elegant from the inside but not pretty", ...etc.

The followups are surpising and delightful: use Drupal regardless!

Nice to hear that ...