Waiting for Drupal 8? Drupal 8 Dev already available in BitNami!

Drupal, one of the most famous open source content management platforms, is getting closer to their next major release: Drupal 8. Although Drupal 8 is not ready yet, we are happy to offer a ready-to-run package with 8.x-dev and drush 7.0-dev (compatible with Drupal 8) so you can get an early look at this much-anticipated release. It can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and Cloud Images.

The development of Drupal 8 is being focused in 7 major "core initiatives":

• + Configuration management: In Drupal 8 configuration lives in files and the database is used only for caching. This allows developers to track changes, put configuration under version control amd update a production site cleanly.
• + HTML5: This is one of the top 5 initiatives for Drupal 8; switch Drupal's default doctype from XHTML to HTML5 adding support for the new form elements to Drupal’s Form API and other features.
• + Blocks & Layouts: Drupal 8 provides a standardized mechanism of output components (blocks, page callbacks, menus, theme settings, and more) and new tools for placing content on a page.
• + Mobile-friendly features: enablement of administrative task management from a mobile device, a mobile responsive design, and an improved front-end performance.
• + Multilingual: New functionality and tools in Drupal 8 core will make building a site with multiple languages in mind a much easier experience
• + Views in core: The Views module which is installed on 70% of all Drupal sites, will be part of the Drupal 8 core.
• + Web Services: With Drupal 8, Drupal evolves from a web CMS into a REST server that includes a web CMS. Drupal doesn't just support web services: Drupal is a web service.

The development phase for Drupal 8 started two years ago and after the feature completion phase, Alpha releases are already available. API changes may still be accepted, and it is time to provide early API feedback before starting updgrading contributed modules and themes once the API is stable. More details about the Drupal release cycle can be found on the Drupal official site.

At BitNami one of our goals is to simplify the testing of the latest versions of open source web applications. BitNami Drupal is completly self-contained and it will not conflict with your current development environment. You can download it, give a try and safely remove it when you are done.

Drupal thrives on developer contributions, and you are encouraged to get involved by testing and provide feedback.

BitNami Django Stack Now Includes Python 2.7 and PostGIS Support

We are happy to report that BitNami Django Stack has been updated to include support for PostGIS and Python 2.7! While we already had this on our to-do list, feedback from several users inspired us to get it out the door earlier that planned. Thank you to everyone who took the time to let us know that they would like to see this, and please keep the feedback coming!

Note that currently, the built-in PostGIS integration is only for Linux and Mac OS X. You can manually install it on Windows (take a look at this). You may also want to check out our PostGIS Quick Start guide.

Why your next web app should be hosted in the Cloud

The emergence of Cloud Computing is changing how web applications are created, deployed and managed. A dedicated hosted server may no longer be the best option. Whether you are developing basic WordPress or Joomla! sites or building complex e-commerce sites with Magento and SugarCRM, there are multiple ways you can leverage the cloud to your benefit.

This article will cover several of the advantages of moving your customers to a cloud platform. It will also explain how BitNami Cloud Hosting (BCH) can reduce the time you must devote to maintenance chores and help you concentrate on your core competency: web development.

The biggest advantage that the cloud offers is flexibility, a new cost-capacity tradeoff. The acquisition of operative capacity traditionally requires meticulous planning, and it requires investment … at least it used to. The cloud offers the possibility of instantly expanding or reducing the size of your servers, with an immediate impact on your cost structure. You don't have to pre-commit resources for a possible sudden surge in visitors, nor scramble to increase capacity before an unexpected surge drowns your site in a sea of un-responded requests, nor lament costly idle resources when the surge did not (yet?) happen. It's the just-in-time revolution, this time in the server room instead of the factory.
The above said, a cloud environment requires a new set of skills, both in setup and ongoing management of your servers, which can be a time and/or money drain, directly impacting your productivity – just as it was before. BCH significantly reduces the non-core complexity of developing and hosting for web developers – it is a gentle on-ramp to the Amazon Cloud. It is more time available for development. It's the cloud made simple and cost-effective with:

• Ready-to-run, consistent, fully configured application environments. No more configuration and version nightmares, such as“which library version is required for this app version?” Your WordPress server is fully configured, up and running in a few clicks. Or SugarCRM, or any of our many full-stack offerings.
• On-demand servers that can be started with one click, stopped with another click – and are essentially free when stopped.
• Simple server cloning – servers can be cloned in a few clicks to test updates or setup new development servers. Delete them when you are done.
• A familiar environment, where things work the same as they do now: you do not have to port or adapt your application to the peculiarities of a PaaS provider. You are still in full control.
• Instant rescaling of your servers, up or down, in a few clicks with the instant rescaling of your hosting costs. Scale up to a monster server, or down to a mite. With a traditional hosted server, you typically need to purchase a machine . That means you either need to purchase a big server that will be underutilized during development or purchase a smaller server initially and migrate to a bigger one when moving to production, and spend time and effort recreating the environment in the new server. As your application becomes popular, you will need to manually repeat the same process to migrate to bigger servers as needed. You can bypass this completely by using BitNami Cloud Hosting to dynamically resize your server as needed without any upfront investment.
• The ability to run multiple applications on one server. Launch a single server to handle several customers, as you probably did with your hosting solution. Or launch one server for each, gain flexibility, simplify your accounting, and forget all about protecting your customers from each other in order to maintain their service level.
• Cost-effective access to development servers on a pay-as-you-go basis. Launch a cheap micro server for development and testing, grow it in one click for deployment. Or develop locally on your own servers, physical or virtual, and easily move to an identically configured server in the cloud when ready.
• Full-server, automatic, incremental backups with the ability to restore the server to any of the snapshots that you have configured. Restoring to a server snapshot guarantees that everything runs just at it did, no more version incompatibility nightmares.
• Automatic server monitoring. BCH automatically monitors all launched servers and provides CPU, disk, memory utilization and other information so you can keep an eye on your infrastructure

Putting your servers in the cloud gives you more flexibility to manage your cost-capacity tradeoffs: more bang for your buck.

BitNami Cloud Hosting gives you the ability to do so with no effort, significantly reduces your sysadmin time, and frees you to devote your full energy to your core tasks.
Give it a whirl at http://bitnami.org/cloud