News and announcements

NextBillion.net, a Drupal site built for World Resources Institute, is nominated for a Webby under the best of blogs in business. And it is in the lead by a smidge as it goes into the final week of voting (if you vote, you can also vote for the Onion under ‘humor’, it is a Drupal site too!)

NextBillion also turns one year old this week and it makes me smile to think of its run and how so much of it was only made possible by community powered software, specifically the power of this community to continue to make Drupal flexible, stable, and secure.

After more than a year of development we are ready to release Drupal 4.7.0 to the world. More than five years, 13 major releases, 30+ servicing firms employing 100+ Drupal professionals, 300+ third party modules, and over 55,000+ Drupal powered sites later, Drupal 4.7.0 is finally here and it rocks!

Drupal is an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, interactive sites like Zimmer Twins, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, and even sites for NASA.

2005 has been explosive for the Drupal community. Drupal.org usage has almost tripled in terms of page views, downloads, and number of users, and with the release of Drupal 4.7.0 we are seeing this new found energy drive the platform development forward at an amazing pace. There have been over 338 contributors to this latest release with over 1500 patches which is almost triple our previous record with Drupal 4.6 of 523 commits by 50 developers. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, new Drupal core functionality, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

Here's the release announcement for 4.7 on Digg.com.