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A few days ago Dries Buytaert announced Acquia, my Drupal startup.

The main reason to start a new company around Drupal products and services? Examining the open source projects that have had big impact on the technology industry, Dries concludes that successful projects usually have a well-capitalized company behind them. The presence of a well-capitalized provider makes projects palatable to users who might not otherwise try them.

The new company’s current working name is Acquia. “Acquia’s software products will include a number of Drupal distributions — for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.”

Will Acquia fork or close-source the Drupal code? Fear not, answers Dries. Since Acquia’s success is directly tied to the overall success of the Drupal project – and to how widely-used it becomes – the new company will contribute to Drupal development just as other companies or individuals do today.

So we wish all the best to Dries and Acquia, and we hope for a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship between business goals and free software!

Among many incremental improvements and fixes, b2evolution 2.2 introduces Search Engine Optimization (SEO) presets.

“Check out the SEO tab under “Blog Settings” to see how the SEO experts would optimize your blog!”

Version 2.2 also fixes a lot of small issues with 2.1 and a stable 2.x release is foreseen around the end of the year.

To learn more, please read the release announcement.

SilverStripe 2.2.0 is “a major release containing a staggering quantity of new features and work from our ten Google Summer of Code students and an equally impressive effort from the core team.”

SilverStripe 2.2.0 has a redesigned interface and workflow, with many usability improvements, removed clutter from the interface, and reduced steps to perform common tasks.

Additional features include:

* Multiple language support
* Image uploading and online image editing
* Sitemap.xml file for search engines
* Graphical reporting system
* Web wide single sign-on via OpenID
* Newsletter module enhancements

For full details, please see the release announcement.

Habari 0.3.3 Developer’s Release is now available. Version 0.3.3 “contains several minor code changes and, most significantly, an updated plugin validation function. This fix should solve the issue some users reported with the plugin administration page stalling. If you have had trouble with plugin administration, Habari 0.3.3 should resolve this issue.”

For additional information, please see the release announcement.

ExpressionEngine 1.6.1 “includes all of the bug fixes and enhancements made since the release of 1.6, as well as plenty of new toys.”

For details, please see the release announcement. All the 1.6.1 additions and corrections are detailed in the changelog.