B. Mann Consulting

Matt Mullenweg had to make a pretty clear statement that WordPress is Open Source in response to some sniping from MT.

I already left a comment in support of Matt, and he tossed it back my way:

Thanks Boris, I think the way Drupal and WordPress have co-existed is a great model to follow despite a few distractions along the way, and your role in facilitating that as an ambassador has been crucial. It’s rare for code for one project to be directly applicable to another, but ideas and values are contagious — in the good Isley Brothers way.

I know how this can be. We flirted with dual licensing around Bryght's mass hosting system, Hostmaster. In hindsight, it probably delayed development by 2 years. Now hosted on Drupal.org, Hostmaster has a couple of more developers buying in and it feels like we're developing some momentum.

We made a Bryght "install profile" -- a bundle of code and configuration and a little custom module for doing some cool stuff with CSS overrides. From day one, it's been hosted on our public SVN repository, and includes the original CVS tags from Drupal.org itself.

It was amusing to watch that MT4 actually had as a feature that other systems had adopted their templating system -- namely a single contributed module in Drupal that can support MT themes for bloggy sites.

Basically, sniping other open projects isn't cool. In the first meetings that the Drupal community ever had as a group, in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we had Joomla community members and senior devs. It was so fun playing with the Joomla guys and matching t-shirts and groups shots with Rasmus at OSCMS 2007. Amy Stephens +1 -- check out Open Source Community.

The "enemy" here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

I ran a couple of not really that successful because they were TOO Drupal heavy "Open Source CMS Summits". I'd love to do more of them, because we have so much to learn from each other, but we are all so focused on growing our own communities, each bit of *friendly* rivalry pushing the others to get better. Like the Isley Brothers :P

Hi, you may remember me from such roles as the first Drupal Association Board of Directors. This is a bit of a recap of my year's involvement with the Association, along with an explanation of my current feeling about it, and that I won't be applying for a Board position this next year. Oh, and if you're a current or prospective Permanent Member, you should probably read this.

Well, it looks like the press release is hitting the wires already, so I thought I would come over and announce on Drupal.org directly.

Bryght and Raincity Studios are joining forces. The Raincity team is going to acquire Bryght, and we'll continue to apply the Bryght brand to (more coming soon) install profile "products" like our current Bryght Light, and also to our hosting solutions.

It's been great to have Raincity sharing an office with us (they moved in at the end of September), and now we're one big happy family. Robert Scales, the leader of Raincity, is actually off in China making the company evening bigger -- we're opening an office in Shanghai!

I'm excited to have a bigger team to work with, especially lots of designers (I love the cool BADCamp logo that Hub from Raincity did!). But, not just design, but a production team with which we hope to "lead by example" -- contributing to and supporting many of the key modules that get used for every client project, and jumping on the bandwagon of test cases and code reviews.

So, from the entire 22-person Bryght-Raincity team, thanks to the whole Drupal community for building this shared space and shared project that we can continue to make better together.

Remember, BBQs are open every Thursday starting at noon, so please stop by if you are in town :P

The answer is "probably yes". I just wrote up a description of our Vancouver Drupal Users Group event over on Bryght, but saved the provocative title for here.

I think that maybe I'll lift my stance on only adding Facebook apps that have a "public Internet" face as well. Much as I hate locking data into Facebook, I do want to support local developers: ActiveState's Up4, DabbleDB's DabbleDo, and the soon-to-be-released Opus Player by the Donat Group / Project Opus.

But don't think I won't be continuing to push folks to figure out ways to nicely push and pull data in and out of Facebook in a way that benefits the open Internet as well as respects the privacy and security of user's content within Facebook.

Finally I wanted to share with you that yes, we did indeed continue to chat over beer. The strangest phrase that came up was camel cheese. Nice.

Joyent hosted a meetup for Joyent customers and friends tonight at Chill Winston. I'll place myself in the "friend" column, and really, if you host a get together in the lounge that is on the ground floor of my office building, you know I'll be showing up :P

I wrote up some more thoughts on virtualization and my discussion with Mark Mayo over on my Bryght blog (or included here directly via transclusion).

SuperHappyDevHouse - Vancouver Edition
Originally uploaded by kk+.

SHDH is coming to Vancouver...this Friday, at the Bryght offices, 1PM to 1AM. Upcoming that, bi-atch!

OK, OK -- there's a wiki page with more info on it, too. BBQ, Beer, XBox (somebody want to bring a Wii), coding, etc. etc. Maybe art? Whatever, we've got 12 hours, let's see what happens....

In other events:

• Vancouver PHP monthly event is is PHP, remote XUL, and jQuery this Thursday, also at Bryght's offices
  
• here's a DemoCampVancouver early access notification -- May 24th at Work Space!

Congratulations to Ben Wong for the launch of Sutton.com. Sutton is one of Canada's largest real estate companies, and it now has a nice and clean "Web 2.0" style website. Well, maybe not THAT web 2.0 – a distinct lack of tag clouds :P

What it does have is a Drupal powered backend, cleanly designed HTML and highly search engine friendly structure.

It was very nice of Ben to mention Bryght as part of the team that put Sutton.com together. Actually this was something that I and other members of the team were involved in even before there was a Bryght. In reality, most of the kudos should go to Ben himself, who is not only a programming and sysadmin ninja, but also did a great job of managing the dev team to see this to completion. And of course, Dave Shea's Bright Creative consultancy is who did the great design.

I'll be watching this site with interest, and hope Ben will give us a report on traffic and other commentary in a month or so from now. I know there are many more possibilities waiting in the wings, especially now that they've got a web application framework in the form of Drupal underneath. Who knows, they might even add tag clouds... 

After about 3 years of running multisite and working on some variant of "install profiles" with our whole team at Bryght, I reactivated my CVS account on Drupal.org and created the Install Profile API "module".

I'm incredibly proud of commit 62627.

As Kieran Lal of CivicSpace said at the recent OSCMS Summit, creating install profiles creates a new "profession" in the Drupal ecosystem: install profile maintainer.

It combines the consulting skills of taking business requirements and translating those into a selection of Drupal modules and configuration. It takes a bit of rigor and diligence to keep track of included modules, and listening to the community that is using your install profile. 

I'm excited about the installation profiles on drupal.org. Every community can potentially bundle a custom package and easily leapfrog the (frustrating) learning stage of what module should I use and how do I configure this.

If you haven't already, go on over and check out Lee Lefever's The World Is Not Flat site, affectionately known as "TWINF". It's running on Bryght, and we had a hand in twiddling a few bits of the code -- specifically, Colin mucked with maps and is now an AJAX god (or so he tells us) and Richard wrestled with custom PHP snippets and blocks. The always powerful Mark Yuasa of Raincity Studios did the CSS-fu to keep the site looking daisy fresh.

Why should you care about TWINF? Well, number 1, Lee (of Common Craft fame) is a very cool guy who is going to be travelling around the world next year with his wife Sachi. It fits in the category of international travel blog, but Lee and Sachi don't just want you to be able to keep up with what they're doing...they want to hear from you. The idea is to gather people's experiences which will help them decide where to go and what to visit (and what not to visit).