A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

As a user of Drupal, let me start by saying thank you to all the developers and advocates that brought Drupal 6 to light. I've been watching Drupal 6 grow from a distance this past year and have made some observations. There is a lot more sweat, tears, and love put into Drupal than most outsiders realize. Those of us that have used Drupal during the past six years owe a lot to those of you active in the Drupal community.

You can check out the release announcement at Drupal.org for all the new features and enhancements that have been rolled into Drupal 6. Let's look at some of the highlighted features in Drupal 6 which I've listed below.

"In one of the most significant moves yet in the growing push toward service interoperability on the Web, tech giant Yahoo announced Thursday that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 standard for a universal Internet log-in."

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I'm convinced that digital identity and universal authentication systems will make it big on the IT radar scope for 2007. While a number of propriety systems have cropped up over the years, the open-source project OpenID has started to make headlines as it tackles the problems and solutions for digital identity.

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.

I was first introduced to OpenID through the blogs of Scott Kveton. In one of Mr. Kveton's recent posts he talks about open source projects using plug-ins and modules for converting their content management system (CMS) over to OpenID. More specifically, he discusses the use of a Drupal module for adding OpenID support in his post, Converting your site to OpenID.