This coming week nearly the entire pingVision family will be at DrupalCon Boston 2008. Some of us have been at previous events, doing presentations and otherwise just getting involved (not to mention taking in the scenery). This time we're coming as Platinum Sponsors and presenters.

First, the new faces:

Al Steffen joined us about a year ago, but never had the opportunity to travel to any of the Drupal events outside of the greater Denver area. In fact, I just learned today, he hasn't even seen a proper ocean. Some may know Al online as Zarabadoo, the handle he uses on IRC and Drupal.org. He's the man behind the nicely semantic Hunchbaque theme (ugly on the outside, beautiful on the inside).

Drupal 6 is released today, with lots of new features. We're especially excited because of the improvements in the theming area. I think a lot of people will like the new drag-and-drop administration area.

For a quick rundown, check out Greg Knaddison's screencast.

And for people new to Drupal, or just not all that comfortable with the idea of installing and configuring your own state-of-the-art content management system, take a peek at Addison Berry's screencast on installation.

When working with an open source project like Drupal, there's always the question of how a company offering professional services can invest in its open source platform. For vendors of proprietary CMSs, it's rather obvious: they develop and maintain their own code, in-house, or pay licensing fees to companies who own and maintain the code base.

With Drupal, we don't have any licensing fees. It's free to download for anybody anywhere, licensed under GPL v.2. And the code is already undergoing active development by top developers worldwide, whether we chip in or not.

And yet we at pingVision most definitely benefit from the continual improvements in Drupal, so it only makes sense that we invest in some research and development on the core code base and contributed modules. In an open source project, this means contributing to the community effort -- being a part of the do-ocracy that makes Drupal what it is. Besides, I feel it would be our loss if we didn't have our developers putting their expertise towards the commons from which we benefit. By giving we gain. It may seem counterintuitive to folks more familiar with the strictly proprietary business models, but it's the giving and sharing by the thousands who've been participating over the past six-plus years that has made possible the power, flexibility and scalability of Drupal as a first-line content management system.

The open source path can be a delightful and cost-effective way to go for a web-based project. However, if you don't understand the primary dos and don'ts of open source, a "free" open source website can quickly become a costly and difficult bear to manage.

As open source software becomes more popular and more relevant to the needs of non-tech-minded people and organizations, we thought we'd offer some basic background on how to use -- and not to use -- open source for a web platform.

Read on....

The other day, I proposed facilitating a discussion at the Open Source CMS Summit 2007, hosted by Yahoo:

Building community online

Community building is more than just software, and more than just people. The nature of online communities is changing, no longer defined exclusively by bulletin boards or superblogs.