Development Seed's just announced that their Open Atrium distro/'installation profile' of Drupal is just about ready to be released.

For those of you who haven't heard of it yet, Open Atrium is an interesting Drupal-built Project Management package (basically, some modules, Drupal 6 and a custom theme with some config options setup when you install it).

I'll get into a fully hands-on review of it soon, but for now, pop over to Development Seed's blog to read the deets and be sure to watch the video below to clue into this cool free project.

Incase you missed the big news back in September, there are some major things happening in lieue of Drupal 7's imminent release - specifically related to making it easier than ever to use.

The video above introduces Aquia's new 'Drupal Gardens' project; which will provide a hosted-Drupal platform that people can create sites with very very very easily, aided by a custom theming engine which seems to work very much like Squarespace's.

it looks like Drupal Gardens won't be available to the public until Drupal 7, and the base set of modules Acquia chooses to include with it, are stable.  When it is out though, I perceive Drupal suddenly becoming much more attractive [or just less daunting?] to graphic designers, hobbyists, and developers who want to make quick-turnaround, simple Drupal sites.

Imagine - finally being able to have a Drupal-run site without worrying about what modules you need to build it, or any considerations of database/hosting/code stuff.  Of course, they haven't yet announced how updates or feature advancements will be handled by their central hosting platform, let alone the module set that their hosted Drupal Garden sites come with.

Tumblr is a great idea - the hosted service lets you sign up for free and then create a blog that is essentially comprised of different types of content - text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video.   Your tumblog can be posted to quickly and re-themed using their provided ones or custom html; all editable within their web interface so there's no need for ftp'ing files etc...

Okay, so its yet another blogging tool.  What's so great about that?  Well, asides from the fact that it has different content types to segment views by them (something not in the de facto wordpress standard approach), tumblr's unique in letting you import rss feeds automatically into your tumblr site!  Cool eh?

Drupal heads reading this will no doubt instantly say "Whatever man, Drupal can do that in a second!" and they're right; it can.  We recently took a stab at building out a site to do everything that tumblr does for Flavorpill in NYC using Drupal 6 and some contrib modules.  Ultimately, we wanted a site that lets anonymous/public users contribute as well as logged-in ones, all submitting the same types of content.  The main benefit of registering on-site was keeping track of your posts with a profile page that features a User Tracker.  read more »