Drupal goes to Mars, or rather, Drupal helps us go to Mars ... eventually. NASA's Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University is doing a lot of advanced work with Drupal. They have a number of Drupal sites, each with a different purpose, but all used to share information about Mars as discovered by ASU's THEMIS camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. All of the sites have some interesting integrations with other software, including LDAP, legacy authentication systems, Java Servlet based web services, Flash, Java desktop clients, map servers or Google Earth.

Their main portal, http://themis.asu.edu, features news, images and articles about THEMIS and the Odyssey mission. Another Drupal site, http://viewer.mars.asu.edu offers a search portal for millions of images and data from eight instruments on Mars orbiters. It uses Drupal and jQuery as the interface to a Java Servlet backend database and integrates "Deep Zoom" style image viewers.

Ever wanted to help explore Mars? No problem, http://suggest.mars.asu.edu is for you. On this Drupal site you can suggest places on Mars for scientists to photograph with the THEMIS camera aboard Mars Odyssey. The site shows you where Odyssey will be orbiting in the next week, and it integrates with Google Earth's desktop application and the Google Earth browser plugin to let you zoom around mars and choose a place to suggest. After it made the suggested photographs, it will send you an e-mail with a link, where you might be the first human to see that particular spot on mars in such detail. If that makes your inner geek jump up and down, make sure to read their technical write-up. Cool stuff!

The official website for the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority is using Drupal. Check out http://london.gov.uk because it is a great site! Every major city deserves such a site. ;)

The Kofi Annan Foundation is using Drupal. Kofi Annan was the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In 2001 Kofi Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Since leaving the United Nations, the Kofi Annan Foundation supports Kofi Annan in his current work to press for better policies to meet the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.

Le Figaro, the oldest and second-largest national newspaper in France, started using Drupal for its social features on http://www.lefigaro.fr. It is still using its old web content management system to serve its main content, but all of the social features such as comments on articles are now provided by Drupal.

I met the engineering team, including Le Figaro's Chief Technology Officer René Wallendorf, for lunch when I was in Paris last week, and they were very happy with Drupal. The integration project was delivered on time, within budget and was considerably cheaper than the alternative solutions they had investigated. All things combined, this should be a big win for Drupal, especially in France. Vraiment très cool!

Some of Le Figaro's print publications. Le Figaro is also the official translator of The New York Times, pictured in the middle of the photo.

Left: Chief Technology Office of Le Figaro. Right: the community manager of Le Figaro.

General Motors is using Drupal for a social microsite over at http://www.gmexpo2010.com. Cool!

The World Bank has many websites and a varied online presence and some are running Drupal. Their climate change site, http://beta.worldbank.org, which launched a few months ago uses Drupal. The site serves as a beta for the new content strategy the Bank would like for the future: an integrated model of publishing around shared topics, countries, and products to achieve greater audience reach and satisfaction. This site takes a single topic: "climate change", and aggregates World Bank content from a variety of sources in an automated fashion.

The World Bank's mission is to reduce global poverty and improve living standards. It serves as a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Global climate change is a major priority for The World Bank as developing countries will be particularly vulnerable to adverse conditions caused by it.

The World Bank has reams of information regarding climate change but it was separated by organizational groups and internal systems and it was nearly impossible for a visitor to find and combine these different sources. To counter this problem, The World Bank engaged Phase2 Technology to launch a pilot site that demonstrates the potential success of a topic-based site with large amounts of data. In addition to great tools for data integration and visualization, the site has support for low end mobile devices and multimedia integration.

It's very satisfying to know that Drupal is powering such an important site which is poised to help better the plight of developing countries. Experts anticipate climate change will hit the third world the hardest. This site is one of the more prominent Drupal sites The World Bank currently has, but it is a great example of how to effectively showcase data on important issues. I hope they will consider using Drupal for future projects.

The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization that stewards the Symbian platform, an operating system for mobile phones and smartphones. The Symbian Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. Today, their website runs Drupal.

Mercycorps.org, the public website for Mercy Corps, is using Drupal. Mercy Corps is a humanitarian aid agency headquartered in Portland that works in over 40 countries worldwide.

Mercycorps.org just brought in more than $4 million USD for Haiti relief. They used the boost module to handle the tremendous flood of traffic that they received the last couple of weeks. Over $500K USD of the money was raised through Personal fundraising pages, which are nodes that donors create and then send to their friends. They had over 2,000 people sign up for Mercy Corps (Drupal) accounts and create Personal fundraising pages. The fundraising pages are still going strong and raising thousands of dollars for Haiti relief every day.

The site was built by their in-house web team with support from the Portland Drupal community.

Stories like this make me want to work on Drupal. It is absolutely rewarding to see that Drupal can help enable organizations like Mercy Corps. In addition to indirect help through Drupal, my wife and I have also made a monetary contribution for the victims in Haiti.

The website of Bruce Golding, the Prime Minister of Jamaica is using Drupal: see http://www.opm.gov.jm. Ya man!

NVidia recently launched their new Tegra developer community on Drupal. See http://developer.nvidia.com/tegra. The announcement of the latest Tegra 2 chipset was one of the major news items at CES earlier this month. The Tegra 2 chipset incorporates 8 independent processors to handle web browsing, HD video encoding/decoding as well as mobile gaming, all with very low power consumption. It is perfect for tablets ...

NVidia came to Acquia to help them get the site built. Development was done by Chapter Three (an Acquia partner) and Wiredcraft, while Acquia hosts the site on the Acquia Hosting platform and provides 24x7 monitoring and support. They are also using Mollom to protect their site against spammers.

Red Hat just launched OpenSource.com on Drupal. The site will focus on exploring what happens when the open source way is applied to the world, beyond technology. The site has 5 main channels: business, education, government, law, and life. In each channel, they'll explore how open source is having an impact on each of those areas. The content is meant to be very conversational and participatory, making Drupal a natural choice. Needless to say, it is great to see Drupal being used to promote Open Source way beyond technology. It is also rewarding to see Red Hat, the mother of all Open Source companies, using Drupal.

Red Hat came to Acquia to help them get the site built. Development was done by our friends at Palantir (an Acquia partner), while Acquia provides support and hosting.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) is a Fortune 500, multinational corporation that manufactures a wide range of consumer goods such as Gillette, Ariel, Pampers, Duracell, Braun and much more. With annual sales in excess of $83 billion USD, they are the 8th largest corporation in the world by market capitalization. Guess what? They are using Drupal for a microsite at http://www.pgsupplier.com/. The site provides easy access to information for prospective and current Procter & Gamble suppliers. The site doesn't look pretty, but given Drupal's bottom up grassroots adoption, this could be a big deal nonetheless.

Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt unveiled Data.gov.uk today. The new website offers public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use. It is designed to be similar to the Obama administration's data.gov project, run by Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer in the US.

What is exciting is that Data.gov.uk uses both Drupal and various semantic web technologies to encourage people to create data mashups and to visualize the data in clear, imaginative ways that provide more insight in the underlying information. It is great to see that Open Source, Open Data and government meet, and it is great validation for Drupal's adoption of the semantic web. Hot stuff!

Intel Corporation, the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, is using Drupal for its Intel Atom Developer Program, a website for developers that want to create and sell software applications for netbooks and smart phones that are using the Intel Atom processor.

Flemish commercial television channel VT4 is using Drupal on http://www.vt4.be. VT4 is part of ProSiebenSat.1 Media, the second-largest broadcasting group in Europe. Cool!

Ashley Tisdale - an actress, singer and television producer - is using Drupal on her official site.

If you don't know who Ashley Tisdale is, it just means you're too old. Bear with me, as with this post, I'm trying to attract more young people to Drupal. ;-)

More royal Drupal goodness. This time her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is using Drupal: see http://www.queenrania.jo. Queen Rania is well-known for talking about using social media to help change the world -- follow her on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. You rock, Queen Rania! (Hat tip: Usamah)

After the Emmys, the Grammys are onto it as well. That is, the new Grammy.com is using Drupal -- and Pressflow to be specific. The Grammy Awards, or Grammys, are presented annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievements in the music industry. Cool!

Following hot on the heels of US President Barack Obama, Albert II, King of the Belgians, just relaunched his website on Drupal. Check it out at http://www.monarchie.be. The site was built by Connexion and Internet Architects.

The Japanese Fujifilm, with more than 75,000 employees the world's largest photographic and imaging company, is using Drupal for a community site at http://www.myfinepix.com. It is a website where FinePix camera owners come together to share images, knowledge and inspiration. The site features galleries, forums, photoblogs, news, competitions, user profiles and much more. A good showcase for some of Drupal's social media features.