There have been an ever increasing number of public organizations and private non-profits -- including medical institutions and educational facilities -- making the move to open source or hybrid open-proprietary software solutions.

Of course there are a number of compelling reasons for this trend beyond the frequently cited savings or escape from vendor lock-in. One of the reasons that the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine chose Bluenog to provide its content management system, web portal and business intelligence software was the flexibility that open source software offered in integrating with its legacy systems and infrastructure.

Acquia, which provides commercial support for and its own distribution of the Drupal content management system (CMS), today gave attendees at Drupalcon Paris 2009 a first look at Drupal Gardens. The project had been previously code-named Acquia Gardens, and is the company's upcoming software-as-a-service version of Drupal designed to speed the design and deployment of Drupal social publishing sites for non-technical users including small business owners and web designers. It looks like it could help extend Drupal out to many new users who might shy away from installing and learning Drupal from the ground up, and help Drupal compete with hosted publishing platforms.

Undoubtedly, the open source project Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems (CMS) around. It provides the infrastructure and manages processes for many well-known web sites, including The Onion, Fast Company, InfoWorld and OStatic. We've had a great experience with it, and many large media companies are migrating to it and saving money. In our interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, he described the core contributors to the project as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel." There are also over 2,000 modules for Drupal, making it hugely extensible.

Since OStatic's inception, we've collected many good resources for both getting started with Drupal, and extending its functionality if you already use it. Here is our latest update to that ongoing collection--eight great resources, including interviews with Drupal insiders.