Sustainable software powering sustainable business up for a Webby

NextBillion.net, a Drupal site built for World Resources Institute, is nominated for a Webby under the best of blogs in business. And it is in the lead by a smidge as it goes into the final week of voting (if you vote, you can also vote for the Onion under ‘humor’, it is a Drupal site too!)

NextBillion also turns one year old this week and it makes me smile to think of its run and how so much of it was only made possible by community powered software, specifically the power of this community to continue to make Drupal flexible, stable, and secure.

Why Drupal Powered:

As the guys at WRI have been blogging about sustainable and green business and how it can help people in developing countries, behind the scenes the site has experienced the usual growing pains but its scale and modules allowed it to adjust.

I figured I would list out a few specifics that might help other people looking at Drupal see why it is a smart decision (and also pay a little homage to the people behind the scene that made this possible).

Solid core: It was built on Drupal 4.5 and is now running on 4.7

Themeability: From project listings to user profiles, PHPTemplate and the abilily to override theme functions via the template made these easy.

Security: From using captcha and other tools to prevent comment spam to the trackback spam – about 1 every few minutes (even with bad behavior module enabled) – the tools to combat spam on Drupal have stayed effective. Thanks to a whole Security Team and several security releases already made, Drupal is that much stronger.

Upcoming : In the next couple months we will be incorporating Logintoboggan, googlemaps, the tabs module in Javascript Tools, and much more. People continue to roll out many effective tools for making a Drupal site a pleasant user experience.

As you can see by even this incomplete list, this is community powered! Thank you for everyone’s incredible work on Drupal over the last year.