We've seen explosive growth in 2005 and 2006 based the ability for Drupal sites to rapidly deploy new features that meet real world customer needs, not just fulfill technical requirements. This project aims to increase consultant and site administrators ability to effectively manage releases, security, versioning, issue tracking, and feature deployment into customer ready production environments. By directly improving the Drupal.org release and project management infrastructure we will speed up the life cycle for meeting customer and user requirements and ultimately improve the ability to manage Drupal web sites. Donating to this effort provides funding to accelerate volunteer contributions the Drupal.org project maintainers have made over the past 8 months.

Overview

• Contributions will have real releases and version strings, just like Drupal core itself
• Security announcements will refer to exact versions of modules that are effected
• Issues will be tracked by the exact version number of the contribution where the bug is present
• Development branches for any given version of the Drupal core -- maintainers can add new features to their module or theme without endangering the stability of other code that is compatible with the same version of Drupal core.
• All contributions will be clearly identified with the version of Drupal core they are compatible with
• Users will be able to subscribe via email or RSS to all releases of any project on drupal.org (including Drupal core)

Current total: $1,808.61 (27.8% of total needed) (Last updated: 2006-09-30) Digg this proposal

Hell Opens Up New Exclusive Layer for Drupal Developers

(PRWeb) -- Last week, the Drupal Content Management System became the first opensource CMS to have its own layer of hell. Though many proprietary CMS's, most notably Vignette, have long had their own exclusive parts of hell, this was a first for open source.

Today I spent some time on themes.drupal.org. I upgraded it to the 4.7 branch, skinned the Drupal installation completely and removed some lesser used features. This means we now have all the latest themes available again.

Fantastico De Luxe by Netenberg is an add-on for the popular cPanel web management software, available on many web hosting providers. It promises an easy, turn-key installation of dozens of web applications, including the Drupal CMS.

Unfortunately, while it may appear to fulfill those promises, the only thing Fantastico really gives you is a broken, insecure install that is hard to update. That's why we strongly advise the Drupal community not to use Fantastico to install and run a production Drupal site.

Don't just take our word for it however: take a look at the many support threads in our forums discussing problems with Fantastico. Its users have consistent problems with the installation and upgrading of even a simple Drupal site, let alone one which uses one of the many contributed modules available on our site. There are multiple reports of corrupted databases, lost files and broken installations.

After leading the Drupal security team for a long time, Karoly Negyesi (chx) is stepping down due to other commitments. Heine Deelstra (Heine) is taking on this important responsibility.

Karoly will still be on the security team, just not heading the team anymore.

The Drupal community would like to take this opportunity to thank Karoly for all his security team contributions in the past and look for more in the future. We also wish Heine the best in his new and challenging role.