Evolt.org is delighted to announce that it has moved its main site from a bespoke solution to Drupal. When we first launched evolt.org, content management systems cost USD $100.000 and more, so we took the revolutionary step of building our own (and later open sourcing it). For the last 6 years, evolt.org had lived on a custom built CMS, migrating from MS Access and Windows NT, to Oracle and Linux to MSSQL and Windows 2000 along the way. The previous evolution was launched in December 2000 (yes, really), and had served evolt.org extremely well.

Welcome back to the Drupal newsletter! We have received great acknowledgment from the community, and have had a generous supply of content thanks to our contributors. As always, we are a completely open newsletter. Good Drupal-related content is always welcomed and encouraged!

As you probably already have heard, Drupal 4.6.3 was released this week. The new XML-RPC vulnerability this addresses would allow an attacker to take over the server.

A code freeze in preparation of 4.7 was also announced this month. The freeze, scheduled to happen on September 1st, will move the latest HEAD code into a new 4.7 branch to be worked on, and debugged, before final release.

The Google Summer of Code (SoC) workers has also made some great enhancements to the codebase, adding many new modules and features for Drupal users to enjoy.

There is a lot more to discover this month, so let’s get started...

The move was successful and we are now running on the new hardware!

The database is now running on the Sun Fire V20z server donated by Sun Microsystems. The web frontend is powered by one Dell 1850, the plan is to add a second one to load balance. Currently we are waiting for the second server to be delivered, and there are still some issues caused by having more than one server that need to be planned out in more detail.

The mail and cvs are still being hosted on the old hardware, again waiting for the new hardware still to move these to their own dedicated machine. Once the rest of the hardware is up and running we will start working on moving the rest over.

Update by Dries: Scott Kveton from the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University has additional details.

Inspired by awsamuel's "stirring first person narrative" on the Telecentre.org's reasons for choosing Drupal, I was compelled to share the experience of choosing Drupal for Greenpeace Canada's Kleercut campaign.

Even though our exploration was mostly in the area of e-advocacy tools and the biggest decision was whether to build on Civicspace or Drupal, the Kleercut camapaigners and I felt that documenting our story would be helpful for the Drupal community at large. The campaign started in November of 2004 with a small budget and big ideas ... and it has steadily grown over the last eight months to include a network of over 10,000 activists and steady on-the-ground wins for this anti-corporate campaign.

During the OSCON in Amsterdam, Drupal people will come together and discuss the current state and future of Drupal. To gain as much attention as possible, we need the help of graphical artist and creative copyrighters. In case you care about Drupal and want to contribute something else apart from code, handbook pages or money, please fire up your favourite word processor and/or paint program and help us out.

It has taken us a few weeks to get things sorted with the Drupal donations but as of Friday 8/19/2005 we are officially on track.

Dries and I have been working for a few weeks on getting the generous donations of the Drupal community moved over to the OSL so we could execute on the plans we laid out earlier. Unfortunately international money transfers aren't as easy as international file transfers. That said, we got it figured out this week and have started in earnest on finalizing things.