A Very Special Drupal Birthday

A Very Special Drupal Birthday

default avatar
VonRay Saltini
Januar 15, 2013
FFW Blog - illustration

Happy 12th Birthday Drupal! It may sound strange but in fact marking the birthday of notable code is not uncommon. Search the web and you'll quickly find birthday posts about Windows, Google and Wikipedia - which was also born on this day 12 years ago.

Happy 12th Birthday Drupal! It may sound strange but in fact marking the birthday of notable code is not uncommon. Search the web and you'll quickly find birthday posts about Windows, Google and Wikipedia - which was also born on this day 12 years ago.

One of the special elements of a Drupal birthday wish is the number of people and quality of posts that thank Drupal for changing their lives and take pride in marking or contributing to it's development into a mature code set. Evidence of this is demonstrated not in just the posts themselves but in reader's comments. I keep going back to this post, which quotes the release notes from Drupal 1.0 five years earlier, and bears repeating here because of the perspective it lends to how far we've come and how far we'll go.

 

Today, drop.org announces the release of drupal 1.00 after an extensive period of testing. Drupal is a full-featured content management/discussion engine using Apache/PHP/MySQL and suitable to setup a news-driven community or portal site similar to kuro5hin.org and slashdot.org. Current features include discussion forums, web-based administration, theme support, an open submission queue, content management, a modularized design, PHP sessions, user management with access control and username/profanity/hostname filters, error logging, a public diary module, an affiliate site module, backend/headline generation (RSS/RDF) and much more.

 

It's the, '…and much more.' part that everyone is posting about in today's birthday wishes. Drupal today, and the open source community, has every quality of a long lasting social movement that is weaving itself into the fabric of global communities just as the internet itself.

Today Drupal is also poised to change the face of global Enterprises, large organizations and governments. We're proud of FFW Agency's work for clients such as Warner Music, Career Builder, the Department of Defense and the NY MTA. We're also proud of our work developing an Enterprise class training program and the free and public Drupal training classes we offer throughout the year.

We mark Drupal's 12th birthday with great expectations for the coming year and into the future. And we also mark it with customary good humor - the production of a very special toy, destined to be a collector's item. Fifteen percent of profits go to the not-for-profit Drupal Association. I'm willing to bet there are very few development communities that have their own bobble heads.

Live long and Drupal everyone. Happy Birthday to the Drupal community.

Ray Saltini, Drupal Evangelist/Blink Reaction