We just took the wraps off of Bryght.com. It's not very pretty right now, but hopefully some of the words there will be helpful in explaining who we are and what we want to do.

Our business is going to be mass-hosting of Drupal sites. This means three separate channels: mass deployment (large organizations/companies/ISPs that want to run/deploy 100s of sites), resellers (developers, designers, and consultants that want to offer sites to end user clients but don't want the hassle/administration of installation and maintenance), and end users.

OSCOM 4 is the fourth conference of OSCOM (The international association for Open Source Content Management), where all kinds of content management framework authors and users meet. This fall the conference also features an Apache Track, which means quite a few sessions on Apache Software Foundation projects, like PHP, Jakarta, and the Apache HTTP server. For the first time, Drupal will also be represented on the conference, with an introductory session.

In preparation of the Drupal 4.5.0 release, Drupal development has been frozen. However, I'm going to make an exception for the proposed document management and theme system changes. We have been actively working on these, so they get a couple more days. I hope that we can get these sorted by Wednesday, if not, they'll have to wait for Drupal 4.6.0.

During the initial stage of the code freeze, documentation updates, usability improvements and performance improvements will be accepted. New functionality, on the other hand, will not be accepted unless deemed critical. Thus, the current focus is to strengthen the code base's performance, usability and stability. As we progress, focus will shift towards stability and near the end of the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed, until no release critical bugs are left.

If my timing is right, you are now reading the 10000th item posted on Drupal.org! This count includes everything except comments, which means forum topics, project issues, book pages, images and stories.

The Drupal.org website was started on April 26, 2001. These last three years, the website has been growing steadily.

Some statistics and other tidbits:

It has been a while since the last Drupal 4.5.0 status report so the following is a summary of the key aspects we have been working on since the last status report, posted approximately three months ago.

• Tabs. Drupal pages now use tabs for local tasks as can be seen on this example screenshot.
• Node level permissions. It is now possible to control access to individual posts - either by user, by role or by category.
• Sticky forum posts. You'll be able to make forum posts sticky such that they are presented at the top of the forum topic listings.
• Multiple roles per user. Users can be assigned multiple roles which is very convenient.
• Blogging improvements. We added a 'recent comments' and 'categories' block that are typically available on weblogs, and included support for auto-discovery via RSD.
• Form handling. Form handling has been reworked to ensure consistency across modules and to improve error handling and accessibility.
• Administration pages. We reorganized a significant portion of the administration pages, which makes it more intuitive to administer your Drupal site.
• Gzip compression. To reduce bandwidth, Drupal can send gzip compressed pages.

There is an interesting performance comparison of different CMSes over at mamboserver.com. While Drupal comes out very good, there is still room for improvement, it seems.