Since we organized the first Shanghai Drupal user group meetup last December, eleven months have slipped by without our noticing, and Drupal has gone from 5.3 to 6.6. Countless stories unfolded over this year, and luckily there were no major mishaps ^^. Our Drupal meetups grew from the first one, with just two people staring at each other in the office, to more than 40 people discussing in the spring in the grand European-style hall next to Netcircle's beautiful, imposing kitchen, to the first Shanghai DrupalCamp, and then the monthly meetups that a few friends always kept coming to, all the way to last month, when we went onto a university campus to sow the seeds of China's future hope.
A few days ago came the happy news that Drupal won the 2008 Open Source Overall CMS Award and once again took the Best PHP Open Source CMS award, beating a crowd of rivals, a sign of Drupal's continuing maturity and growth. For Drupal to stand out in this fiercely competitive Web 2.0 era, it has quite a few special skills up its sleeve.
- Drupal's excellent design for installation, updates, modular functionality and error handling won the judges' praise.
- Drupal's excellent features and extensibility, especially for social networking (SNS), and the seamless integration of those features with the CMS, are among Drupal's greatest strengths and have won it countless accolades.
- User participation and contribution are the main theme of the Web 2.0 era, and Drupal's strong and active user community is the most important reason of all for its repeated awards; no other system can match it. It is precisely because there is such a community, and a group of active enthusiasts, ourselves included, helping and spurring each other on, that Drupal has achieved what it has today.
According to the historical record, Drupal has been in China for some time now. Thanks to the tireless efforts of pioneers and martyrs, and especially the valiant fighting and promotion by Raincity Studios over the past year, all you folks now not only have a good localized online community, drupalchina.org, but also a good environment for exchange, with meetups held regularly in both Beijing and Shanghai.
Drupal is being used more and more in China. Local sites include the Beijingers, led by Jacob, training director at Raincity Studios and a Drupal Association board member; Tripgarden (世外游园), developed entirely by a local team; the beautiful website of the Advanced Robotics Lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and there is even a local, Chinese-language Drupal-based virtual hosting service, 双子星空间 (Leoneo).
At the same time, big international companies are testing the waters with Drupal and starting to adapt it for China. Design giant Adobe made a major decision to start using Drupal for the latest showcase on its Flex site. And IBM, one of the biggest companies in IT, recently published on its developer site a very detailed Chinese-language document on using the open source Drupal software to design, develop and deploy collaborative Web sites. With these giants pushing, and countless passionate young people devoting themselves, we believe and expect that the future of the open source era and of Web 2.0 in China will be just as exciting, waiting for us to create it.