I am a long time fan, user and developer of Drupal. I have worked on many Drupal projects including the new belenix website, my personal blog, my college youth club website, sun club website, virtual installfest website, our college's learning management system (in the pipeline) and college library portal. Drupal is an open-sourced Content Management System (CMS) that can be used to host a web-site with pluggable components like blogs, forums, posts, feeds, editorials, triggers, etc. Drupal is powerful, it has got a very modular framework, a powerful, feature-rich administration interface. With drupal, you can setup anything and everything from blogs to community portals to learning management systems to company websites to custom ERP solutions. Sky is the limit. Drupal is backed up by a thriving community driven project at drupal.org and wide variety of themes, modules, etc. + the drupal layout system is very dynamic and let's you control the positioning of content very well.

I am really very excited to blog this (more than anything I have ever blogged about, really).

There is a new Netbeans plugin which adds Drupal support to the Netbeans IDE!

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Here's the nbdrupalsupport project started by Sujit Nair from India Engineering Center, Sun Microsystems, Bangalore. Read the documentation to use the plugin's initially offered Drupal support. In its first phase, they have documented the steps to be followed to host a Drupal site through Netbeans which includes easily downloading Drupal via CVS, creating a new PHP project, configuring the project with Apache and uploading and running the website through the IDE.

The second phase of the project will be much more useful and exciting, wherein, it provides a 'New Drupal Module' Wizard plugin for assisting the development of a Drupal Module,  and on entering the details in the form, the necessary files with the template code get generated automatically. I so very much had this same idea since such a long time!

Here's the blog post which appeared at PlanetNetbeans yesterday. Thanks to Amit Saha for telling me this news this morning!

First belenix.org and now this.. Recently, I'm experiencing synergy of all my interests (Drupal, OpenSolaris, Netbeans, Java, PHP, Web 2.0), but this is as awesome as it can get!

Sun supports Drupal in a big way. In December of 2007, Sun made a second hardware donation (a SunFire X4200 server) to the Drupal Association to support the Drupal.org infrastructure. Sun has been active in the Drupal community and recently gave presentations at DrupalCon Barcelona and BADCamp as well as sponsoring both events. At the DrupalCon Barcelona conference, Scott Mattoon attended the scaling the Drupal.org infrastructure session. Here's the first donation initiated by Tim Bray.

Also checkout this great Drupal-powered Sun initiative called the Open Architecture Network which is like a web2.0 knowledge sharing network for architects around the world who have an interest in supplying their designs in an open source, creative commons fashion to communities in need. It was interviewed by Innovation@Sun.

Learn about the power of Drupal by checking out this recent video with Scott Mattoon, Chief Architect of Sun US Western Region on the SDN Channel interviewed by Kuldip Oberoi on "What makes Drupal Special?".

To see a list of Sun's drupal powered websites, checkout this wiki page. Even the OpenOffice extensions site is powered by Drupal.

Head over to this wiki page to check out the status of several projects underway to benchmark and optimize Drupal's performance on Sun's softwares and systems (e.g- Drupal on Glassfish, Drupal on OpenSolaris and Drupal on Coolstack).

Lastly if you want to do a Drupal installation on OpenSolaris/Solaris, checkout this blog post by Scott: Drupal 6 on OpenSolaris Webstack.

Being a long time Drupal fan, knowing how closely Sun is tied up with the Drupal community, and all the technology synergy possible between Drupal and Sun's technologies - Solaris, CoolStack, Glassfish and now even Netbeans! - is really REALLY exciting to know. This builds up so many ideas - benchmarks, optimizations, tweaks, Netbeans plugins, projects, so and so forth. I just have to use this opportunity and hop on-board!

Technorati Tags: drupal, netbeans, glassfish, opensolaris, coolstack, plugin, sun