Drupal.org, a popular open source content management system (CMS) provider is officially launching the Drupal version 6.0. For a seven years old CMS startup since its first inception in January 15, 2001, and with the released of six major versions, for them it’s no doubt a remarkable achievement. In launching this version, Drupal reported that there are more than 1,600 issues have been resolved during this release cycle, and it also took them more than one year of development since the previous version 5.0. From this, you probably know how much contribution that Drupal community, comprised of over 700 individuals have submitted to this latest version. As expected, the core idea behind Drupal is to give its users a very good PHP & MySQL framework in building the powerful and robust Websites.

This version 6.0 began by satisfying some immediate and recognizable requirements and needs, such as an improved installer, ease the users in setting up the Drupal sites whether their purposes are for blogging or building the Websites. Language features have also been revamped, so if an user want to translate a post, translation can be done through the built-in interface, without having to install any additional module. Perhaps the most notable change in this version is the OpenID support. The OpenID client module has been added to the core of this version. In other word, users can sign on to a site with their OpenID accounts. To do this, Drupal has moved the long time favorite Drupal.module out of the Drupal package. Additionally, jQuery 1.2.3 is included in this version, a feature that jointly effort between the jQuery and Drupal communities.

Currently, there are over 100 third-party plugin modules already available for this newly Drupal release. With Drupal version 6.0, Drupal.org is poised to further growth, they should expected reaching more than 300,000 users by end of this year (Now they have registered 240,000 users).

via [CenterNetworks]

The other day I came across a new personal login service provided by Ping Identity that called SignOn. As stated in their landing page, this service allowed users to gain access to two hundred and three (203) openID enabled Websites, at the time of my writing. One of the strong features that SignOn offered to its users is the addition of Information Cards for strong authentication, according to Ping Identity’s press release. OpenID is a hot topic now, but it seem people and the technology firms are more concerned on how to make openID more secure.

Apparently, SignOn is the newest player that offered this secured personal login service, released in the market just last week. Since this type of services is relatively new in the market, SignOn definitely need to put in more “pull” efforts in establishing their service provider relationship with the end users.

I just came across that WordPress.com has adopted openID, an open, decentralized distributed identity platform. This is an attempt to served as a single sign-in standard on the web for their users. WordPress.com is not the only blogging platform that announced to support openID, the other player LiveJournal has previously made announcement. Moreover, some of the big names are backing the support for openID including AOL (read this post), Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia.

The main reason for WordPress.com to adopt openID is to ease their users by signing in a number of sites with their existing WordPress.com accounts, according to their official blog post.