On interconnected, Matt Webb is thinking about adaptive and evolutionary design in terms of software architecture in order to discuss considerations for the design of weblog software. In this discussion, he discusses the benefits of a pull model of Unix software design, which focusses on the development of small independent pieces of code that make up the software ecology. Matt describes the software components and abstraction layer within this sort of ecology and how they should function, relate and interact with each other to create an ecology that allows for adaptability and evolvability.

These concepts for a weblog platform/environment clearly describe the ecology that has developed out of the Drupal community. Hidden to most users of our Drupal systems is the open development community that lives largely in the development mailing list which shares and corrects bugs, pores over feature enhancements, discusses core and contributed modules and their interoperability, and continues a thread of discussion about how Drupal should be evolved. The core functionalities of this system have been refined slowly and over recent months new and added effort is finally being given to interface issues as a new group of UI designers have joined to bring usability issues to the fore.

Drupal has been an interesting project for me to watch from the inside. I work in an organization with strong roots in Unix application development, which prides itself on its evolutionary design process. This process, however, is one that involves a small team of programmers that independently create elegant applications that interoperate somehow.

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.

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.

After six months of development Drupal 4.1.0 is now ready for some final testing. Drupal is currently in a feature freeze, and has been for quite some time, to make sure nothing breaks before the final 4.1.0 release.

If you have a Drupal site and you want to help testing, consider upgrading now. Anyone who doesn't have an old site and wants to help out can of course setup a Drupal site from scratch. All feedback is appreciated, good or bad.

The source code is available at: