Bob Young
Thanks to Kolgen & Laenen, I had the opportunity to meet Bob Young last night. For those who don't know Bob Young, he's the former CEO of RedHat, one of the biggest open source companies in the world, and the founder of Lulu.com, a print-on-demand books service for do-it-yourselfers. Lulu.com is a service that you'll want to keep an eye on ...
Bob is smart, funny, knew about Drupal, and repeatedly called Kris and myself "young kids". Well, thanks Bob! ;-)
Pro Drupal Development book
John VanDyk and Matt Westgate have written a Drupal book for developers: Pro Drupal Development, published by Apress.
Last week, I finally got a copy of the book in the mail and now I've read it, I can say that it is exactly what we expected it to be: awesome.
So, John and Matt -- for the love of God -- make sure there will be a Drupal 6 version of that book.
More information, including a free chapter on how to theme Drupal, can be found at http://drupalbook.com.
Elias
On April 12th, Veerle and Andy gave birth to their second son, Nathan. On this picture, Elias is cuddling Nathan while still in his mother's tummy.
Drupal Pro book cracks Amazon Top 100
About a week ago the new Drupal Pro book started shipping, and today, the book cracked the Amazon Top 100. And we're not talking about the top 100 computer books here, we're talking about the top 100 bestsellers.
I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive, and rumor has it that Apress, the publisher, already started making arrangements for a reprint.
That ranking might be short-lived but still ... can someone tell me what is going on here, because this is just plain nuts. I didn't expect that to happen either ...
AOL using Drupal
Gábor Hojtsy
Two months ago I invited Gábor Hojtsy to become a co-maintainer of Drupal 6, the next major Drupal version.
As of today, Gábor can commit patches to Drupal's development branch and for the duration of one release cycle, he will help Steven Wittens and myself to shape the face of the next Drupal version by identifying and coordinating interesting development efforts put forward by the Drupal community.
The main reasons for putting Gábor in this role include his work on localization and internationalization, his active involvement in the Hungarian Drupal community, his background with the PHP documentation team, and the consistent stream of high-quality contributions over time.
Having a dedicated maintainer for each major Drupal release has proven to be extremely valuable so I'm hopeful that this decision will be one of my best decisions in months.
Greenpeace using Drupal
The new Greenpeace UK website relaunched using Drupal today. Check it out at http://www.greenpeace.org.uk or read up on some background information. Looks beautiful!
Amnesty using Drupal
According to Rob Purdie from Important Projects, Amnesty International has officially chosen Drupal and CiviCRM as the CMS and CRM platforms it will invest in and build its web infrastructure on going forward.
Drupal companies that want to help re-design and re-architect the amnesty.org website, should get in touch with Important Projects and respond to Amnesty's RFP.
Meeting of minds 2007: the user is the content
On April 26th, C.H.I.P.S. organizes a debate that focuses on the impact of user generated content on traditional media, publishers and cultural organizations.
They lined up an impressive list of speakers and attendees, including people like Bob Young (former CEO of RedHat and CEO of LuLu.com) and Loďc Le Meur (blogger and former director SixApart).
And what's best? The event conveniently takes place in my home town of Antwerp (Belgium).
I'm pretty convinced that by now traditional media organizations have what they desperately needed: a clue -- but I'll bring my big foam cluebat nonetheless, I'll wear my NowPublic advisor hat and I'll bring a number of community experts. ;)