Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.

In 2006 Drupal was the runner up for the precious Webware CMS Award. And last year our beloved CMS even was the overall winner. By winning the competition, the Drupal Association got 5000 Dollars that was used for amongst others funding Drupal Conferences and to buy hardware for hosting the Drupal infrastructure. But even better then the money, Drupal got more airtime and more and more people recognized the power of Drupal.

This year, Drupal was once again nominated in the category "Publishing" and you are encouraged to vote on Drupal to make sure we win again this year. Please help by spreading the word and vote, you deserve it!

DrupalCon Boston is comming up! And from what I have read, it is by far the biggest DrupalCon so far and the best organized!

Looking back at 2005 (only 2.5 years ago!) I brought by own WiFi 802.11b access point, borrowed a beamer from my work and layed down some powercables. A -semi- anonymous client of Bryght paid for the venue, coffee, lunch and opening drinks. Things surely changed since then, 20 people have been busy for months to raise the money needed to hire the venue, have a logo contest (vote!) and do everything that is needed to make sure 600+ people can have the time of their life. And they have done a great job so far and I am sure it will the "even more best-er DrupalCon ever".

You can find some old snaps of Amsterdam 2005 on Flickr. I got only one question: what did Gaele saw on the desktop of Dries? Either way, we have come a long way.

If you want to become a sponsor of the DrupalCon Boston, look at the direct benefits you gain from becoming so. The indirect benefits are far bigger though, both for the community as for your own business. The community profits by making sure a lot of people can get together to talk about Drupal, plan roadmaps, exchange ideas, shake hands and even code! And when you use the code of "the community", you will gain as well. Your company also gets a better alignment with the community that really pays; prospects will find you! Looking back at 2005 Amsterdam, we have come a long way baby!

I recall a very good talk from Rasmus with an AJAX-ified XSS exploit searcher and a good talk as well from David. The slogan "Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy and 'the greatest inefficiency comes from solving problems you will never have'" is the best description of agility I have come across and has become my mantra. Looking forward to Boston I think we have grown in numbers but most of all in quality. Boston looks great!

So please make sure that you go to Boston and sponsor it if you can!

If you are a member of the Drupal Association you can show your "status" of membership by downloading a badge and display it on your site. Not a member? Become one!

By doing so you help the Association to help the community. And therefor the small amount you pay for your membership, actually helps yourself. So be a bit selfish, become a member and show it on your site.

Kieran -on behalf on the Drupal Association- started an experiment with Google ads on Drupal.org. Currently it is only on the paid-services and hosting pages.

Personally I would be fine with running skypscraper format on all forum pages but this is just a temporary test to see how the Association can make some much money without giving the community the feeling that Drupal.org will become a linkfarm. There are lots of less irrelevant ads now, about Typo3 and Joomla related services for example so if you are a Drupal service provider, you might want to sign up at Google and run a dedicated ad on drupal.org. A good way to gain some attention and helping the Drupal community as well.

While we are on the subject of money and advertising, the Drupal Association had some positive news, a Google Summer of Code cheque, the price money from the Packt CMS award and a small profit from the DrupalCon in Barcelona. This money will be spend -amongst others- on hardware and covering maintenance costs of running Drupal.org.

BTW: if you are in to "Advertising 2.0", be sure to read IBM's statement on how the advertising will change the couple of years.