For those of you who might be wondering about my new job at Acquia, and what the company is up to.

Jerad Bitner and Dave Burns, both of whom are Drupal developers for SonyBMG, recently launched a new site, DrupalMAO. It is a site modeled in part on Diggnation, with a focus on Drupal. Their first pilot was released back in February. Recently the Dave and Jerad were busy at Drupalcon Boston filming and doing interviews. They interviewed me on the last day I was there in the middle of the MIT code sprint. I talk about the future of Acquia’s training and certification programs, and what Acquia’s entry into these markets might mean for companies like Lullabot. I also specifically call out for people to share their thoughts and wishes concerning training and certification. Feel free to share these thoughts with me in comments here, via my contact form, or through the Acquia website.

The interview:
http://drupalmao.com/robert-douglass-interview

At the beginning of the month I was interviewed by Sean Kerner of InternetNews.com about the GoPHP5.org initiative, and what it means for the state of PHP 5 adoption. The article is entitled “PHP 4 is Dead—Long Live PHP 5” which is a nice tip of the hat to Dries’ earlier article PHP IS DEAD … LONG LIVE PHP!.

The decision to move to PHP 5.2 as the minimum required version for Drupal 7 has already started to influence people’s thinking about how Drupal is developed. For example, one of the proposals that came from the recent Data Architecture Design Sprint clearly embraces Object Oriented programming as a principle design decision. The way Drupal handles SQL queries is also likely to change dramatically for Drupal 7. A move to a PDO based solution looks likely, and if Chx has been posting provocative ideas that would combine PDO and object oriented code. None of this would be possible without GoPHP5.

While this now seems like the natural progression for Drupal, it wasn’t an easy sell. Many thought at the time we launched the site that we were setting ourselves up to alienate our user base and break Drupal. The final results will have to wait until the release of Drupal 7 to be seen, but I think we’re off to a good start.