Drupal now supports the Atom syndication format 0.3, a XML-based content and metadata syndication format. Drupal supported Atom 0.2 before, so check Mark Pilgrim's Atom 0.3 announcement to learn what changed. When Drupal's Atom module is enabled, a auto-discovery <link> tag will be added to your pages so aggregators can pick up your feed.

The Drupal developers have been little busy bees ever since the new development branch has been created about 1.5 months ago. Those that do not track the CVS commit messages or read the mailing lists might wonder what we have been up to, so let me provide you with a quick run-down of the progress we have made.

Early on, just before the CVS tree was opened up for development, the developers were asked to identify the "smellier parts" of Drupal. As soon these areas were identified, we immediately began to tackle them. As such, the past 1.5 months, the majority of our time was spent improving Drupal's innards.

We upgraded drupal.org from Drupal 4.3.0 straight to Drupal HEAD. So in good Drupal tradition, we are once again using the development version of Drupal on drupal.org. That is, we (developers) get to "eat our own dog food" and you (users) get to see and test that latest changes. The updated site caters to the each of us with better project pages (check the navigation menu), better performance and improved usability.

Upgrading the site was easy and took no longer than 15 minutes. Though, Kjartan and I spent most of the afternoon implementing small improvements and updating some of the contributed modules that we use here on drupal.org. Everything seems to work fine, but please let us know if you find anything out of whack.

The Drupal project has released version 4.3.1 of its open-source content management platform today. There are no new features in this installment, just fixes bugs from the 4.3.0 release.

Drupal: powerful, modular and extensible

Drupal is a full fledged platform for web applications: its flexible, modular architecture can host virtually any type of dynamic website, as is easily adapted to specific needs.

All modules and themes that work for 4.3.0 will work with 4.3.1.

Now that 4.3.0 is released, I think it might be a good idea to start assessing usability issues. I have particularly noticed that there needs to be some attention paid to issues introduced with new features. Maybe we should start discussing this here to explore some improvements.

Today, I have been approached to help migrate a Zope based system to Drupal. After removing some superfluous contrib-modules, the main task was to transplant the 660 existing users to the new system. After some hassles it was possible to extract the user data in xml format.
With only minimal effort a script was written and the site had 660 new users.