What's Coming for Open Source CMS in April 2012

Drupal

In March, the Drupal (news, site) project held Drupalcon 2012 in Denver, CO. More than 3,000 Drupal developers and users attended, all focusing on the theme of "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device." To this end, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert discussed how the Symfony 2 PHP framework will play a key role on building "a rich mobile experience."

March also brought full support for Drupal distribution packaging. This addition enables distribution participants to develop with a consistent set of tools for managing version control, releases, issue tracking, collaboration and documentation. New features include support for external libraries, patches and development snapshots.

Those waiting eagerly for Drupal 8 can expect the feature freeze on December 1, the code freeze on February 1, 2013, and a proposed final release during August 2013. In the meantime, the call for papers and registration for DrupalCon Munich (August 20-24) has opened. Other upcoming events are DrupalCon Sao Paolo, Brazil (December 2012) and DrupalCon Portland, Ore. (2013).

Drupal company Acquia (news, site) released its Acquia Cloud API. This API allows developers to extend, enhance, and customize the Acquia Cloud. There are two major components to the API:

• A RESTful web interface allowing control of Acquia Cloud sites. Current features include support for developer workflow, database and backup management.
• Cloud Hooks, which are scripts in your code repository that Acquia Cloud executes when triggering an action.

Acquia also announced Enterprise Drupal Gardens, a SaaS offering that gives Enterprise users:

• Access to Drupal CMS capabilities such as dynamic content mashups, photo and video galleries, custom content, forms and surveys and social web experiences
• The ability to design with WYSIWYG tools that let you point and click to style page elements and themes, as well as advanced CSS tools
• The option to manage user logins through social and sharing features, letting them use IDs from Facebook (news, site), Twitter, Google+ and other popular social and business networks
• Rich media support, with the ability to embed video, images, RSS items and article previews from more than 200 sources, by pasting a URL
• One management dashboard for your Enterprise Drupal Gardens sites
• Predefined site templates where you can set brand guidelines with information architecture, page layout, content types, navigation, roles and permissions
• One-click site duplication from a template or an existing site
• The ability to integrate with third-party systems, whether you're adding Javascript libraries or accessing data from third-party analytics systems.

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