Back in 2007, my former employer and a current Mearra customer, Uusi Suomi, needed a way to measure and show what's hot and popular on their news site. We initially used Drupal's built-in node counter to list nodes ordered by daily page views. That worked for a while until we noticed the apparent weaknesses: 1) the counter gets reset once a day making near random content the most popular during the slow hours after midnight, and 2) the system favors content published near the reset time as the list feeds itself; people want to read content that other people have found interesting.

Google just announced Google+ for Google Apps users. This means that all of us "corporate" Google users can use the hyped service now.

I have been so lazy in testing Google+ that I actually tested the service for the first time today. All seems fine with it - I don't know what G+ has on Facebook and/or Twitter, but it does its job quite nicely. It might just be a couple years late.

After three years of work and participation from thousands of open source developers, Drupal 7 is finally here! Mearra is already working on implementing large sites on Drupal 7 and we have switched to the new version in our Drupal trainings about three months ago.

Drupal 7 is definitely here. So – join in, download Drupal 7 and see for yourself why D7 is definitely the largest leap in the history of Drupal!

Summary: Always always use the modules mentioned in this post to create an end user and search engine friendly path and redirect system in Drupal. Include this module set in your install profile or site setup workflow, which ever you use. If you’re not a believer after reading this post, please do comment your thoughts.

A partner of ours, Uusi Suomi, has been running a Wordpress MU (now called Wordpress MS) -based blogging community since 2008. The basic stuff – blogging – has worked relatively well there all the time. The use of the word “relative” instead of “great” is based on the fact that the platform was never the most up-to-date version of WPMU and much of the cool stuff that is available now was not there for Uusi Suomi.