MOUSE is excited to announce an important upgrade to MOUSESquad.org - Welcome to Drupal 6!

At MOUSE, our web development team works year-round to provide valuable upgrades and features to MOUSESquad.org to continue improving our users' experience as they connect with the National MOUSESquad network online. Often, these upgrades happen without you knowing - behind the scenes, our developers are debugging and adjusting features constantly. Then sometimes, when an upgrade requires significant changes - major changes to code, or upgrades to the graphical interface - we temporarily shut down the site so that developers can work on it without interruptions and complications caused by activity from users.

So what has changed?

As you know, MOUSE is committed to supporting 'open' development environments for web-based and other software. Almost three years ago, this led our organization to choose Drupal as the foundation for our MOUSESquad.org network site. Just as with any software development effort, periodically there are complete version upgrades to code (and the features that those updates make possible). The same way Windows might introduce a version upgrade from 2000 to XP, or Mac from plain OSX to Leopard, a site's platform can periodically do the same.

By upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, MOUSESquad.org will gain access to new features developed by thousands of developers and members of the Drupal community that will help us grow and improve the ways you're able to use the site to 1) work on Squad-related activities and projects 2) connect with fellow Squads, and 3) spotlight your Squad, your self, and all the amazing work that happens throughout the year.

Below, we've provided some links and related info from the Drupal community. Stay tuned to the WIRE for more updates and announcements on changes to MOUSESquad.org.

From the Drupal Community Site:

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites. Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

To learn more about the Drupal Project.

Read more and check out great screencasts about D6 from the official release notice.

And, finally - Read more about 'open' vs. 'closed' systems here.