The Drupal Association - The Drupal Project's New Non-Profit

The Drupal Association announces the creation of a non-profit corporation to support and further advance the industry-leading Open Source CMS. The Drupal project powers hundreds of thousands of web sites -- including political sites for Hillary Clinton and Redstate.com, social networking community sites like MTV UK and Sony Musicbox, citizen journalism sites such as NowPublic, and sites for government agencies including NASA, NATO, and the World Bank -- and is developed by thousands of contributors from around the world.

The Drupal project (an anglicized version of the dutch word 'druppel', meaning 'drop') can be used for both building community feature-enabled websites with blog and forums, and also as a web application framework for powering custom web applications. Its core is small and functional with a robust API, and features from calendars to Google Maps integration can be easily added in with contributed modules.

The Drupal project is an amazing success story that started six years ago with founder Dries Buytaert, then a student in Antwerp. What began as a hobby project has exploded into an active international online development community. The Drupal project is one of the most vibrant and widely-used open source content management systems (CMS) and has captured market and mind share on a worldwide scale. Dozens of companies across the world provide Drupal services exclusively and contribute to the further development of the project. Search engine giant Google has supported Drupal for the past two years with over $100,000 USD through 25 student stipends as part of their Summer of Code project.

To propel the Drupal project into the future, a new internationally-oriented association has been formed with a simple Belgian non-profit at its base -- the Drupal Association.

The Drupal Association exists to provide the logistical and financial foundation necessary to support the Drupal project's exponential growth and to provide the Drupal project with new possibilities regarding infrastructure, marketing and funding. The Drupal Association will not be involved in decisions regarding the development or direction of the Drupal project itself. The Drupal Association will instead focus on the following efforts:

* Accepting donations and grants.
* Organizing and/or sponsoring Drupal project-related events, and representing the Drupal project at events.
* Engaging in partnerships with other organizations.
* Acquiring and managing infrastructure in support of the Drupal project.
* Supporting development by awarding grants or paying wages.
* Writing and publishing press releases and promotional materials.

The Drupal Association's founding members include project founder Dries Buytaert and key contributors Steven Wittens and Dries Knappen. An initial General Assembly was appointed and an initial Board of Directors has been elected. The Board of Directors consists of nine people, each with a long track record of contributions to the Drupal project. The composition of the Board of Directors and General Assembly also reflects the diverse variety of technical aspects, interests, skills, nationalities and backgrounds that are found within the Drupal project.

The Drupal software project recently commemorated its six-year birthday with the release of Drupal 5, the latest version of the Drupal software. Drupal 5 has been received with enthusiasm and represents a major technological step forward for the software.

The Drupal community organizes two Drupal conferences every year, one in North America and one in Europe. The next so called "DrupalCon" will take place in March 2007 on the Yahoo! campus in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale, CA), as a part of the wider OSCMS Summit.

For more information, please see the Drupal Association's website: http://association.drupal.org/ or the Drupal project's website: http://www.drupal.org/

The Drupal Association is a not-for-profit association, registered in Belgium. Its purpose is to provide support to the Drupal project.

Drupal Association
Langveld 2 bus 12, 2600 Berchem, Belgium

This release was published on openPR.