After wonderful three and a half years, I will be leaving Phase2, this week. As I wipe tears of sadness to be partying with my friends and receive congratulations with the new position, I took time to write a blog post to my colleagues and the Drupal community, talking about my departure and what that means for Phase2 products.

One of the main reasons Drupal is so popular, among hundreds of other open-source content management systems, is due to its developers' constant thirst for innovation and the ability to push the limits of the possible. From its roots as a flexible, hooks-based CMS to modules like Views and CCK, to CTools exportables and Features, Drupal community has been challenging the status-quo, re-thinking the old ways of doing things and constantly delivering more usable, flexible, superior solutions.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new paradigm in content-management systems: an App. Apps are very popular and well-established in the mobile world, but have not been present on the web or in any content-management systems, quite as much. We think it's time for that to change.

Ideation feature for Drupal was released today and it's Kit compliant! In the following blog post we take a look at what this means for the Drupal distributions, where the new module fits in the existing distro eco-system, and discuss the future plans for the module.

A step-by-step guide for setting up and configuring a LAMP (PHP 5.2) Stack on a 1GB or 2GB RackSpace Cloud Server.

Phase2 will be in Copenhagen! And we have selected a variety of topics that we would like to share our vision on. If you are planning to be at DrupalCon in Copenhagen, this August, check-out the list of proposed sessions and panels by Phase2 and please vote on the ones you might be interested to attend.

Drupal Multisite is a powerful and mature tool for creating platform deployments of Drupal-based web-systems. However creating a release structure that allows atomic deployments of individual sites within a multisite is a somewhat less explored problem. Presented blog post describes one such approach that uses Subversion version control and a set of bash scripts for Linux to automate the process.

The World Bank Group has announced today that it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers. The data will be immediately available through the World Bank Open API for developers and and also gets a user-friendly user-interface at: data.worldbank.org

The ability to write self-contained modules (thank you, Hooks API!) and a very flexible theming layer are two important aspects behind the power and extensibility of Drupal. The following blog post describes how to leverage this power and write "proper" modules - modules that externalize all rendering logic into TPLs, suggest default implementation but allow themers to override default TPLs if needed. Several use-cases are discussed.

Earlier this year we blogged about the launch of a new Open API, which Phase2 built for The World Bank. The Open API allows third-party developers and organizations to freely query World Bank's largest dataset containing world economic and business indicators and create all kinds of interesting mash-ups.

Today Google announced the addition of the API data to its search results.

There has been increasing amount of discussion and debate about Smallcore initiative in the Drupal community. Smallcore's purpose is to separate Drupal's CMS capabilities from the core framework APIs and enhance Drupal's characteristics as a universal web-development framework. The Smallcore movement mostly benefits the development of packaged Drupal distributions - a hot topic in the Drupal community, these days.

Phase2 Technology is the author and maintainer of two popular Drupal-based distributions: OpenPublish and Tattler (app). We also have worked on numerous high-profile Drupal-powered websites. In this blog post we try to digest the two perspectives and offer some of our ideas regarding Smallcore and Drupal's future, in general.