Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search.

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If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that website users like to get timely notifications via email if there is something new to be seen on the site. Acquia Drupal includes the comment notify module that can help achieve this goal for your site. It sends email messages to content authors and commentators whenever new comments are added to content. There are ample subscription options to suit everyone, and an unsubscribe mechanism so that nobody has to endure unwanted items in their inbox.

You might remember that a while ago, Drupal was promoted to the 'Visionaries' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. For someone unfamiliar with all the social software vendors and projects, the choice can be overwhelming and Gartner's reports can carry a lot of weight in the decision making process. Drupal's promotion to the 'Visionaries' category was a big win for all of us.

Using Drupal has suddenly become much easier. Acquia has just released into (private) Beta Drupal Gardens. We've been working on Drupal Gardens for over a year, teaming our expert Drupalers with our crack infrastructure / hosting experts, to provide Drupal 7 as a hosted service. We've included tons of usability improvements, and contributed the vast majority of them back to the open source project.

FOSDEM is one of the great European tech conferences, held every year in Brussels. Two years ago I spoke there and introduced the Apache Solr module to the world. Dries and Gàbor introduced Acquia. So much has happened in those two years!

This year, on Sunday, February 7, I'll be back to once again talk about Apache Solr and state-of-the-art search techniques. There's a whole Drupal track, called the Drupal DevRoom, and plenty of other interesting sessions going on, too. If you can make it to Brussels for Fosdem I highly recommend it. It's full of that nitty-gritty hard-core geek stuff that makes open source software tick!

P.S.: The FOSDEM site uses Drupal, of course!

I have a pretty big update for you: we just launched Drupal Gardens into private beta. Since the first public Drupal Gardens demo at DrupalCon Paris, a lot of progress has been made. Today, we sent private beta invites to the first people that signed up to be beta testers, and if things go well, we'll send out a couple thousand more invitations over the next few weeks.

I am very excited to announce our first webinar for Drupal Gardens Beta. On Thursday, January 28th at 1 pm EST, Acquia will be demonstrating Drupal Gardens and walking through the major features of Gardens. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal 7 designed for any organization wanting to build social sites easily and quickly, backed up by the power of Drupal. Building microsites for launching a new product, a campaign or event, or forming a community site has never been this easy in Drupal. Drupal Gardens highlights:

NVidia recently launched their new Tegra developer community on Drupal. See http://developer.nvidia.com/tegra. The announcement of the latest Tegra 2 chipset was one of the major news items at CES earlier this month.

Red Hat just launched OpenSource.com on Drupal. The site will focus on exploring what happens when the open source way is applied to the world, beyond technology. The site has 5 main channels: business, education, government, law, and life. In each channel, they'll explore how open source is having an impact on each of those areas. The content is meant to be very conversational and participatory, making Drupal a natural choice.