NAMM (the International Music Products Association) launched their WannaPlayMusic.com site this week, coinciding with Music Week, May 5th through the 9th.

Achieve's own Bill O'Connor (Drupal user csevb10) will participating as a mentor in this year's Drupal Summer of Code aggregator project. Bill has done substantial work on the Drupal Simplefeed module, working closely with Ted Serbinski (m3avrck) on a major overhaul in the summer of 2006 and the Drupal 6 upgrade earlier this year.

Drupal earns another feather in it's cap today with the announcement of the Webware 100 awards. The Drupal CMS is one of the nine finalists in the "Photos and Pubishing" category, selected by Webware and voted on by over two million Web 2.0 application users.

I have been working on upgrading the caching contrib modules to Drupal 6 and started to notice some patterns and duplicated code, which led me to think Drupal's approach to caching in general. We currently have a fairly limited API for caching, but we have a magic bullet that helps us overcome some of these weaknesses: the cache.inc override system. Anyone who has spent time on large production sites knows that one of the easiest ways to see better performance on your Drupal system is to use one of the existing cache mechanisms that I spoke about at Drupalcon Boston.

Achieve Internet is proud to have been an integral part of the development process for the new FastCompany.com business community site. We provided custom Drupal software development and project management leadership to deliver a world-class union of award winning journalism and online community. The site incorporates a professional grade content management system and editorial workflow controls, along with a full suite of cutting edge Web 2.0 applications.

I am very happy to announce the release of Memcache 1.7 for Drupal.  The most notable improvement being the addition of pluggable sessions for memcache.  Memcache is an instrumental module for scaling Drupal sites and we now have a release that is more stable than ever. 

Capturing the value created by using open source for a project within an enterprise client is influenced by many factors- evaluating total cost of ownership, ease of use and customization and extending the source code to new applications. However, I believe another aspect of value is in viewing a move to open source, as creating a real option within your IT department.

Going through two years of graduate work (and still paying for it) for a MS in Educational Technology was an eye-opening experience. It seems that no matter how old you are, kindergarten tactics for teaching still works wonders. I still marvel at my hard-earned teacher salary going towards instruction content such as "Effective Use of a White Board", "Zen and the Art of the Overhead Projector", and the much-feared "Copyright Law and Properly Setting Your VCR to Record a Show". All of this post-graduate work can be summed up in two sentences:

The various open source communities have been an integral part of computing for over two decades. They provide a platform for development, as well as create a continuous mode of improvement.  However, I believe that the biggest value add from open source is the ability to create flexible extensions and improvements custom tailored to whatever environment it is deployed. Granted, these deployments require specialized expertise, but so do commercial packages- and those packages really do not allow, much less encourage creative enhancements.

We would like to express our gratitude to Tao Starbow, his team and UC Berkeley for all of their outstanding work putting on the Bay Area Drupal Camp.