Drupal, the open source content management system, has now reached version 7.

Version 6 was originally released on 13 Feb 2008 and has suffered from a difficult administration dashboard, the need to add extra modules to make the system usable and a painful process to upgrade the core and extra modules.

Drupal 7 resolves many of these issues and now balances the power of configurability with ease of installation and maintenance.My only very minor complaint is the status report highlights the need an additional core PHP files to enable a file-progress bar – I would prefer to be able to suppress this alert.

Apart from this niggle this is a very welcome upgrade of Drupal although I will be sticking to WordPress for blogging.

Drupal 7 will only be ready for production-use for mainstream site when other modules such as Mollom anti-spam module are released as version 7 compatible and even then some site administrator may wait a few month for any remaining security issues to be uncovered and resolved.

Evernote (www.evernote.com) is cloud based storage system for notes, pictures and PDFs that provides web and native clients for a wide range of browser, desktop sand mobile operating systems.

Unlike most cloud based services which only have browser-based web clients and email facilities, Evernote also has rich native clients for Apple MacOS X, Windows Vista/7, RIM BlackBerry and Apple iPhone/iPad.

The native clients for desktop systems also have clipping tools for browsers and screenshots. The native clients make the service far more useful in capturing and searching for information and provide access to the materials when offline or if the service ever becomes unavailable for some reason. The notes can be categorised using tags to create hierarchies and relationships in addition to the more traditional folder structures.

Evernote search indexing performed on their servers based and includes a text recognition in pictures, with handwriting to some extent, alongside keyword searching in notes.Evernote also provides an API so third party services can provide additional functionality and reuse Evernote functionality instead of creating their own implementation.

The free account is limited to uploading 40MB per month whereas a premium account provides a 500Mb per month limit, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) data encryption, the ability to upload any file type and search with PDFs.

[Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Evernote other than being a full paying customer of their subscription service]