Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Larry Garfield from Drupal




Bitnami interviewed one of Drupal’s core contributors, Larry Garfield, for an inside look into the future of Drupal. With over 1 million active users it's easy to understand why Drupal is one of our most popular PHP solutions for content management, and why this application keeps evolving.

If you are just getting started or already a big fan of Drupal, this interview will give you some great insight into how Drupal maintains their community and what the future looks like for this application.

In the interview, Larry explains:
  • Who uses Drupal 
  • How to get involved 
  • What new features we should expect 
After learning more about the project, you can launch Drupal to the cloud or deploy it locally with free installers, virtual machines and cloud templates from Bitnami. Get started in the cloud for free with a $200 credit from Microsoft Azure.





Stuart Langridge:       These are the Bitnami Open Source Leaders Series of Interviews.  I'm Stuart Langridge, and I'm talking to Larry Garfield, who's a long-time Drupal core contributor. He's web services initiative lead for Drupal 8 and he's basically the de facto Drupal ambassador to the PHP world. Hi, Larry. Welcome to the podcast.

Larry Garfield:           Hello.

Stuart Langridge:       So the first obvious question is what's Drupal?

Larry Garfield:           Drupal is an open source content management platform written in PHP. It's an enterprise-grade piece of software, and it's been used by large institutions from the White House to MTV to Amnesty International, the king of Belgium and so on, but it also scales down to small nonprofit, small company/corner store type sites and everything in between. It aims to be the CMS for the entire market spectrum with an emphasis on content strategy and content modeling by thinking of the web as more than just a bunch of pages but as content management that you can then expose on the web. That's really where Drupal's strength lies.

Stuart Langridge:       You've named a bunch of organizations that are using Drupal from the very large to the very small. Are you deliberately targeting everyone from the very large to the very small, or are there particular types of organizations that you think Drupal is best for?


Friday, March 20, 2015

Security fix for Drupal, new versions 7.35 and 6.35 released

The Drupal project has just released two new versions that fix multiple vulnerabilities, and one of them is considered moderately critical. You can find more info about these issues on the Drupal's blog post by their security team.

Some issues include: 
  • Password reset URLs can be forged under certain circumstances, allowing an attacker to gain access to another user's account without knowing the account's password
  • A malicious users can use the "destination" query string parameter to construct a URL that will trick users into being redirected to a 3rd party website
We have released Bitnami Drupal 6.35 and 7.35 installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2, Google and Windows Azure cloud images that fix this issue. If you already have a running version of Bitnami Drupal, you can update it with the drush tool.

$ cd /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal/htdocs
$ drush up

We will continue to work on updating and releasing new versions of Drupal-based projects: CiviCRM and OpenAtrium.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Squash added to the Bitnami Library!


We're happy to introduce Squash as a part of the Bitnami Library!

Squash is a collection of tools that helps engineers find and resolve bugs in their code by automatically collecting, collating and analyzing run time exceptions.

It consists of the following components:
  • Client libraries for different systems (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Cocoa with Objective-C, etc.) that catch errors when they occur and send them to the API endpoint. 
  • The website, which displays information about caught bugs and help engineers find the root cause of it, so it can be fixed. It also lets engineers manage, assign and comment on bugs, as well as view statistics for each one of them. 
  • API endpoints, which routes (part of the website) receive exception notifications from the client libraries and processes them. 
Squash has great features and benefits, which include:
  • Smart code analysis: Squash analyses stack traces of every exception to find the line in which it is happening and then figures out who might have caused that bug. 
  • Fewer emails: Squash only send emails to the engineers responsible for an exception. 
  • Better data: Squash points out the values of environment variables, instance variables, etc., when a bug occurs in the Value Inspector. 
  • Collaboration: Squash includes a full-featured commenting system, ticket-management system and a news feed, letting you collaborate on, and track the progress at fixing a bug
If you want to take a look at Squash, you can launch a free cloud demo server. By clicking the button below, you will have your own Squash instance running for 1 hour, for free!


Don't forget to visit our wiki to learn how to manage your installation. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.

Would you like your favorite app to be part of Bitnami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our monthly contest!