Recently we quietly enabled newly created Bryght sites on our hosted service platform with the OpenID and FeedBurner modules, though at the time that upgrade did not apply to older sites. This was because we had to run the database updates for each site, and we wanted to make sure we got it right.

We've done that, and starting this morning, all Drupal 5 hosted service sites have been upgraded to Drupal 5.2 with the new functionality. This means that you can login using one username and password for all your sites and track the subscribers to your RSS feeds. Our Chief Screencasting Officer Roland has created two screencasts showing and explaining how to login to multiple sites with your OpenID, and later today he will post a screencast on setting up RSS feed stats and other cool services using FeedBurner to support.bryght.com.

If you notice that your site is no longer recording events to your "Watchdog", as part of the upgrade we have switched to using the "Database logging" module, so you may need to go into Administer » Site building » Modules and enable it. Also, if you notice anything a little off in your website starting this morning, please send us a note and we'll look into it.

OpenID is an open decentralized identity framework where you can get your own identity and re-use it across the internet. The first application is single sign on which means you can login onto many websites and web applications and services (more being added daily! And all Bryght Basic sites can now support OpenId) using just one id (a URL) and one password rather than multiple passwords and multiple identities which is the case today.

To explain OpenID single sign on, we have two new screencasts for OpenID which has been included in Bryght Basic since July 31, 2007:

• Logging into a Drupal Site and Ma.gnolia using OpenID Screencast
• Associating an OpenID with your Drupal Account

Yesterday we updated support.bryght.com to the latest tagged release, which means you can login to the site using your OpenID. I've written some documentation on how to login via OpenID (the documentation does not yet apply to hosted service sites, but will soon). Also, we added FeedBurner to the Bryght Support site, so we can do a little bit of tracking of stats around how many people read the site. Also, since FeedBurner makes it easy, we've added block on the sidebar where you can add your address to get security updates via email. As usual, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of the security updates instead (it's the feed icon at the bottom of the security updates page). The FeedBurner documentation is almost done, so I'll publish that shortly.

This afternoon we are releasing new functionality, bug fixes and security patches to our release of the Bryght Basic profile for VPS customers as part of the 2007-07-31 tag. While we haven't made any configuration changes, we've added the OpenID module, for logging into multiple sites ( more information about OpenID), Drupal or otherwise; the Persistent Login module, which adds "Remember me" checkbox at the bottom of the user login box; and the FeedBurner module ( more information about FeedBurner and its services), so you can redirect your RSS feeds to FeedBurner to keep track of statistics and add other features the service provides. Documentation on setting up and using those modules is forthcoming.

We have not yet deployed these changes for Bryght Lite hosted service customers.

The tag includes the official Drupal 5.2 release, which incorporates some security patches—see below for some special instructions regarding settings.php—and various bug fixes. Also, VPS customers can send Drupal system messages to Syslog, which lets you route them to a log file or to another monitoring service. (System messages can still be logged in the database using the new "Database logging" module.).

Update: those who retrieved the tag last night will want to run svn update, as we added some very minor fixes to the .info files of some of the modules.