drupal.org

The Drupal.org redesign continues to progress. This is great news and a morale boost for everyone involved.

Since our front page post on February 3...

• Over 20 enthusiastic new volunteers have come forward to lend their expertise.
• Several experienced professional Drupal project managers have been added to the project management team
• We have produced two new theming documentation. This will help the theme implementation teams standardize their implementations. See details further on.
• Contributors can sign into the new *.staging.drupal.org subsites (groups, association, api, localize, etc.) in additional to the main site now.
• We continue to need expert resources with knowledge of drupal.org data sources to assist with custom Solr development
• Trellon has checked in an alpha dashboard and we now have a beta version of the main Download and Extend page.

Once the major blockers are cleared, we will push forward with engaging the MVP implementation volunteers that signed up last year.

Our next sprint will be on Friday, March 19th from 8am PST/4pm GMT to 12pm PST, 8PM GMT. We aim to focus on theming, and completing the search generated blocks. The sprint will be held on IRC in #drupal-infrastructure.

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Drupal 6.16 and 5.22, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Drupal 6.16 also fixes other smaller issues.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in the Drupal 5.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 will no longer be maintained when Drupal 7 is released. Upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

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Drupal 6 Attachment Views, by me, J. Ayen Green, is my second title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at Drupal web site developers who want to build more functionality and interaction into their views, but aren?t ready quite yet to take on panels. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

I wrote this to be a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide. It uses actual case study that was developed in parallel with the book?s writing. This guide presents purposeful and interactive examples that build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples help you to learn quickly to use this exciting feature of views.

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Over 400 session submissions have been submitted for DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held April 19-21, 2010. We need your help in deciding which of those sessions will be included in the conference program. Please come review the list of sessions and vote on the ones you'd like to see most.

Voting ends Monday, March 1st at 23:59 PST.

DrupalCon is a community-driven event. You've shared with us a vast array of exciting new ideas, proven recipes for success, case studies, best practices, new solutions to old problems, and other gems of knowledge. Now help us narrow down the selection. Your opinions are what shapes what happens at DrupalCon. Remember, every vote counts!

If you're a business, organization, or individual interested in helping to sponsor DrupalCon San Francisco, opportunities are still available. Contact us via the Web site, via e-mail at fundraising@drupal.com or phone at 415-894-9320 today!

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The Augusta Chronicle, the flagship newspaper of Morris Publishing Group, recently relaunched its website on the outstanding Drupal framework.

Morris first began using Drupal in 2005 with the launch of BlufftonToday.com, a blog-centric community website coupled with a free daily newspaper. In 2006 it adopted Drupal for both news and blogs at SavannahNow.com, the website of the Savannah Morning News. Both newspapers won Digital Edge awards for innovation in user participation.

Since then, the digital media arm of Morris Communications, Morris DigitalWorks, has developed a robust digital newspaper platform built on Drupal 6, to eventually power all 13 of its daily newspapers. Morris also uses Drupal for its radio stations and Skirt.com, a national specialty site for women.

Reader Participation

Morris has made a commitment to make their online platform a dynamic arena for reader participation and contributions. Readers are encouraged to comment on stories and blogs, and, on some papers, are encouraged to create their own blogs on the site. Journalists are expected to post news online immediately and to interact with the public, and they need to be able to do it without learning HTML or tools such as FTP. These requirements made Drupal a natural choice.

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Drupal 7 is moving along nicely, and is becoming increasingly stable. We just released a second alpha release, fixing a number of critical bugs, following our initial alpha release in January. Alpha releases are to give Drupalistas something to download and test, so they can report and help fix bugs.

When will we switch to betas? We will switch to betas when the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is working. Once we hit beta, we will become increasingly strict about accepting any more changes and we'll also commit to making HEAD to HEAD upgrades work.

Finally, we'll start rolling release candidates once the number of critical bugs is zero (or close to zero). To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

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In early 2009, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis determined that it needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla! 1.0.x to Joomla! 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future-proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla! sites that comprised www.archstl.org into a single Drupal installation.

This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.

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Our first Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the second alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

The most notable change for developers is moving $form['#field'] to $form_state. This makes field forms more resilient to form_alters and debugging became a lot less tedious. Comment body became a field and new fields can be added to comments through the field UI module. And congratulations to the docs team and associated helpers for their outstanding work in enhancing and correcting lots of API documentation this release.

We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused all files to be deleted after six hours. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

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From the earliest days of the Internet, many firms have tried to build community sites for medical professionals. Large sums of money were expended on technologies, and expectations around these feature-rich sites became very high.

So when a longstanding client, Jobson Healthcare Information (JHI) in New York, wanted to build a community website for America?s 200,000 pharmacists, we at ISL Consulting took it on as a welcome challenge. Given JHI's strong position in the market ? they publish the most popular professional magazine for US pharmacists ? we knew there would be no shortage of domain expertise or marketing prowess. The question was whether Drupal would permit us to build an affordable yet world-class website with everything from e-commerce to personalized pages, an elaborate friend activity notification system and other community features medical professionals have come to expect from professional sites.

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Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for Drupal users of all experience levels, including module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even themers.

The book contains basic and advanced topics on Drupal performance that will appeal both to the Drupal novice and the advanced user or developer. With this book you will learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal 6 framework using best practice performance solutions and tools. The book covers how to vastly improve performance through upgrades, caching, configuring and optimization using core and contributed modules.

As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

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Vital Signs 2.0 (VS) is an educational citizen science project consisting of an extensive Drupal website created by Image Works in Portland, Maine for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) and funded by the Hewlett Foundation and a generous in-kind donation of services by Image Works.

The VS project provides students, teachers, scientists, and citizen scientists with the tools to monitor environmental conditions throughout Maine. The project includes a structured central data repository, tools and protocols for identifying, mapping, tracking and analyzing the occurrence and spread of invasive species into and around the state. Beginning in fall 2009, these resources and supporting programs are being utilized on the laptop computers provided to all Maine middle school students and will be made available to all interested parties starting early 2010.

The project's site is composed of 13 original custom Drupal modules, approximately 2 dozen Drupal core modules, more than 40 contributed modules, Google Maps and other web services. In order to give back to the community that made this project possible, we are releasing the full source code for the website under the GPL license and adding it to the Drupal.org project repository.

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Just a few years ago Drupal.org was maintained by a small team of insiders. Now, we are making major changes to the site using the community's many developers and themers.

This update provides the Drupal community our implementation redesign progress, where we've run into challenges, and provide information about our future plans.

The following update provides insight into:

1. Our progress so far
2. The present focus of the implementation and management team
3. Where help is needed from the community

1. A Redesign Progress Report

The Drupal.org redesign is an effort started in 2007 to make Drupal.org meet the needs of the growing Drupal community and showcase the power of the Drupal software. In 2008, an exciting and visionary new design for Drupal.org was completed by Mark Boulton Design and the community.

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After a highly successful Drupal deployment for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) national website, the ASMP decided to again use Drupal for their next project: Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow, or dpBestflow for short. DP Bestflow is a Library of Congress-funded initiative to provide an all-encompassing resource for digital photography best practices.

The ASMP once again teamed up with Chicago's Grillo Group for graphic design, and Philadelphia-based web development firm Context to perform the Drupal implementation. The most impressive part of the site, however, is the immense amount of rich, useful content, the majority of which is the handiwork of digital photography gurus Richard Anderson (author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow) and Peter Krogh (author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers).

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After a lot of work, waiting, staging, and such I am proud to announce the addition of contributed projects to the automated testing system. Contributed projects may now take advantage of the same system that Drupal core developers have been using for over a year with great success. The deployment comes quickly after the recent 2.0 launch in late November of 2009. In addition to adding support for contributed project testing a number of other features have been added, most notably:

• Coder and Coder Tough Love review support.
• General e-mail notifications - the devlist mailing list will get an e-mail when Drupal core breaks.
• A number of UI/workflow improvments on drupal.org.
• Grouping of reviews by type or plugin to make room for a cleaner multiple database testing workflow.
• Additional administrative tools for qa.drupal.org and testing clients.
• Views RSS feed plugin for aggregation of test events and results.

For an example of the test results, please take a look at the current Drupal 7 (HEAD) results or one of our beta contributed project results, such as poormanscron.

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The San Francisco DrupalCon organizing committee is happy to announce that session submissions are open!

Come see the sessions that have already been proposed, and if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, suggest your own. Drupal's community is what sets it apart from the pack, so come be a part of the magic!

The session submission and voting schedule is:

• January 15, 2010 to February 15, 2010 - Session Submissions Open
• February 16, 2010 - March 1, 2010 - Public Voting on Sessions
• ?March 5, 2010 - Speakers Notified?
• March 15, 2010 - Final Schedule Posted

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SharkScopers is a Drupal 6 site that allows online poker instructors to sell screencast tutorial videos. The first two minutes can be viewed by anyone. Users can purchase credits that unlock whole videos. Instructors then receive a cut of the profit.

Jonathan Brown from Blue Droplet Media in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been helping Mike Jonas from SharkScope in New York develop the site for more than a year. It uses Jonathan's Blue Droplet Video module extensively.

Mike had done a lot of research into what system should be used to build the site. His primary motivation for choosing Drupal was so that Blue Droplet Video could be used. He was blown away by how BDV integrates with CCK and Views, allowing the fundamentals of the site to be created with great ease.

Jonathan and Mike have very well defined roles within the project. For each task, they consult via email and Skype to construct robust specifications. Jonathan then implements the required functionality. A release early, release often methodology is used, allowing the site to innovate rapidly.

The fantastic theme was created entirely by Mike as a Zen sub-theme.

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Healing Thresholds Autism Therapy provides comprehensive therapy fact sheets, daily updates of research and news, and a global directory of autism therapists. The site has become a standard and definitive source for autism treatment information. In particular, the site provides layperson-accessible summaries of essentially all child-focused research from the last 3 years, in addition to earlier seminal papers.

The two biggest challenges of the site have been to expose all of the deep content we've authored and to monetize it. We have over 2000 carefully-written research and news summaries and user-generated content. We also have over 1000 taxonomy terms, and we've authored detailed definitions for nearly half.

Our redesign last month upgraded the three-year-old Drupal 4.7-based site to Drupal 6. More importantly, we used the flexibility of Drupal to completely re-architect how users find and interact with our content. Where previously we had separate sections of research and news, our new tabbed interface displays -- in a search engine friendly fashion -- all of the relevant content for each of over 1000 different therapy topics.

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After nearly two years of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first alpha version of the Drupal 7.x family. This alpha includes a tremendous number of new features and new under-the-hood improvements for both users and developers.

We revamped Drupal's user interface, added key contributed modules including CCK and ImageField, introduced a new object-oriented database layer, revamped file handling capabilities, and an automated testing framework based on SimpleTest, among literally hundreds of other improvements. Drupal 7.0 alpha 1 is the collective work of over 800 core contributors.

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

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The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is an open source project developing a free virtual appliance library that pre-integrates the very best server-oriented open source software. TurnKey Linux appliances are simple, ready-to-use servers that are designed to "just work" and can be deployed in minutes on a virtual machine, bare metal or in the cloud.

The purpose of this case study is to discuss our experience using Drupal to implement TurnKey's web site.

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Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours helps you get up to speed with Drupal quickly. Whether you're starting from scratch or working to fill in some gaps in your Drupal knowledge, you'll find descriptions, examples, and Try It Yourself numbered steps to walk you through working with Drupal.

This book introduces you to Drupal and to major components ranging from the basics (overall design, themes, administration, security, and the like) as well as modules that are distributed with Drupal itself along with contributed modules that enhance your site. Each chapter is focused on a single task so that you can jump around according to your needs.

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New training to help you learn how to build Drupal themes is available online from Lynda.com. Drupal: Creating and Editing Custom Themes shows how a Drupal theme can alter the look and feel of a web site. Drupal evangelist and author Chris Charlton introduces the core themes that ship with Drupal, how to install and administer new themes, change color schemes, and add sub-themes. Also demonstrated is how to build a custom theme from scratch, what templates are possible in Drupal themes; integrate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and how to theme specific nodes, pages, and blocks by building a theme step-by-step for a fictitious online flower shop.

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My new book, Drupal for Dummies, is now available. My intended audience is non-technical, so if you've got a friend who wants you to build a Drupal site for them, this might be worth mentioning to them. The companion Web site, http://drupalfordummies.com was created using only the information presented in the book.

You can find out more about the book here:
Click for Drupal Association affiliate link to Amazon!

I'd love to hear from you with any comments or questions.

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With 2009 closing and 2010 coming, it is time to look back over our shoulder and see what a great year we had. And it is time to look ahead and predict where the future of Drupal will lead us to in 2010.

2009

Lets start with looking back. Drupal turned eight and in CMS years this means we are young at heart while grownup in our soul.

At Dries' site, you can find a selection of sites that Dries found worthwhile mentioning, maybe because he liked the site, the implementation or the usage or the owner of the site can potentially influence other prospects to see the Drupal light. Let us take a look at that list and see what they have trends we can conclude from that list combined with the knowledge about our community.

Many big name sites switched to Drupal in 2009. In the media / entertainment market, some of the names include:

• Virgin, Slate, Monthy Python and Lucas Arts

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Over the last year, the redesign has been progressing with many infrastructure and feature improvements. We have had 6 drupal.org sprints in both Europe and North America. On January 8th, 2010 we are going to have a drupal.org redesign virtual sprint. Many members of the Drupal community and the drupal.org infrastructure team have participated in the redesign so far. In order to help complete the minimum viable redesign we've recruited 24 Drupal consulting companies to help implement the main redesign landing pages.

Sponsoring companies

We specifically requested companies to sponsor pages because this part of the redesign required a broad range of skills including project management, content, design, theming, and development. We believed that sponsoring companies were used to marshaling a collection of resources to deliver sites to their customers. We believed these companies could scope, estimate, and deliver these redesign sections. While we've had 24 companies sponsor sections to date, we still require more sections of the site to be sponsored. If your Drupal company is interested in sponsoring a section please review the redesign implementers guide to understand how to contribute.

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GreatBrewers.com, a Drupal 6 site, powers BeerCloud, a mobile app available in the Android Market and iTunes App Store that helps you pair beer with food, track down your favorite beers in your neighborhood, and pull up a full description of any beer with a scan of its barcode. Whether you're a beer consumer who could use some guidance in making a well-educated purchase, a food lover who wants to discover new ways to enhance a meal with a suitable beer pairing, or a traveling beer enthusiast who wants to instantly map the closest stores, bars, and restaurants carrying one of your favorite beers, BeerCloud is the quintessential mobile beer app.

Great Brewers is powered by America?s leading network of beer passionate wholesalers that collectively represent the interests of the world?s best brewers by promoting education and awareness through shared resources. The mission of Great Brewers is to bridge the gap between the world?s great brewers and the consumers who enjoy their products, with a paramount focus on education and on enhancing beer distribution practices through the sharing of information.

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