PureGin.org

I had the chance yesterday to see some of the first demos of new versions (and in some cases, first releases) of File Framework, Mail API, and XMPPClient, three really amazing new modules for Drupal. All three modules were developed for OpenBand on behalf of its clients.

File Framework is Miglius Alaburda's (miglius) and Arto Bendiken's (arto) very sexy new version of a document management framework for Drupal. As an example of its functionality, a user can upload a Word document, which is automatically virus scanned, converted into PDF, text, PNG images and thumbnails, and presented in a flash page viewer. Metadata about the document and all of its derivatives is stored as RDF.

Mail API is a comprehensive update by firmidea (Denis Voitenko) to the existing module by gcopenhaver. Denis has significantly fleshed out the mail API to provide a mail backend that provides comprehensive, high-performance support to Drupal-based email applications. His motivation, of course, is to provide support for his own Webmail Plus, soon to be released in its Drupal 6.x incarnation.

The final module I wanted to showcase today is XMPPClient by darren.ferguson, which provides an xmpp interface to Drupal for managing online presence and updating users' xmpp rosters, integrated with the buddylist module. The XMPPClient module also provides the very slick and extremely functional xwchat web client which is fully integrated into Drupal, but which can actually also be used standalone.

I would have considered any one of these three modules a huge win for the Drupal community and ecosystem - any one of these could be a foundation for a successful commercial Drupal-based web-application. They're also a great confirmation of the soundness and versatility of the Drupal 6 platform. To see all three demo'ed in one day was pretty mind-blowing!