I'm increasingly confident in Drupal 4.1.0's release readiness. As such, chances are we'll release Drupal 4.1.0 within two weeks. I've seen quite a few production sites that use the Drupal 4.1.0 release candidate, yet it is desirable to have it tested in a diverse set of setups. If you have a Drupal 4.0.0 site and you want to help quality assurance testing, consider upgrading now.

We are currently working on a redesign of Drupal's administration pages; the goal is to improve usability for both novice and experienced Drupal users. Michael Angeles, a long time Drupal user/contributor, has been blogging about the redesign so make sure to check out his Drupal-related blog entries.

Bill Humphries wrote:

Frank Booseman would like blog tools to support walled garden posting. He's inspired when a friend would love to post photos from a party, but not to the whole world. Live Journal, which I've been playing with lately, supports this. It can, because it's a monolithic (on the server-side) application. I created a LJ account, and friends who were already there added me to their 'friends' list, and added them to mine. They post a private entry, and their friends see it, but not others.

Pete Prodoehl suggested to look at Drupal, to which Bill responded:

Drupal's a nice system, but it doesn't do what I really want: I'd like a system which does not require the user to set up an account. I'd like to get a token in the request that says "I'm Jane User, and here's my assertation that I'm Jane User", and since Jane User is my friend and her assertation could be verified (though a public directory, or because someone I trust has signed her key), she gains access to the friends and family-only materials on the server without signing in. And, the key piece is that this may be the first time she's been on the site.

Live Journal can do that because all the journals are part of the application, and I sign on once. Any LJ user can recognize me as their friend, and I get access to their friends-only materials.

The godsawful piece is the public key infrastructure.

Which reminds me of this blog entry where Paul Bausch describes how he experimented with PGP-signed comments and how he think it would be a good way to verify identities. The talented folks behind MovableType picked up the tread saying that it could possibly be used to build a web-based verification service with a trust web.

As online communities (incl. the weblog community) continue to grow, and as more and more websites become interactive, identity theft might become a big enough problem that we'll want to deal with it. An interesting challenge for 2003?.

I wrote a wiki module for version 3.0 (it was working but still needed some more development) and am wondering if it is worth updating it to 4.1 I stoped development mainly because I dont have a wesite to host a site on and because I found that drupal was still a little primative so I thought I might wait for further development before continuing. I would like to know if anyone else would like a wiki module. Also there are basically 2 options, either create a new node type (this is what I did basing it off the colaborative book) or create a filter type module (similar to smilies etc) and I would like to know if anyone has any preferences.

Drupal supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability) by means of the rsd.module, which can be found in the contributions repository.

Really Simple Discovery is a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or "work with" server/weblogging software.

The new Recommendation Module for Drupal is a "collaborative filtering" engine. This means that the module predicts interesting nodes, according to your personal tastes.

The innovative principle is based on "automated user-based collaborative filtering". Check, for example, Amazon.com's "Customers who bought this book also..." or the MovieLens university research project.

Think of it as a "word-of-mouth" system, where friends would recommend you interesting nodes.