drupal.org - Community plumbing

Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

read more

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.

Many of the projects this year build on work done during previous Summer of Codes. Drupal core will benefit from a new aggregator, improved search scoring, OpenID attribute exchange, revamped help system and color module, SimpleTest security scanner and generalized Validation API. There are also projects focused on improvements to the Drupal.org infrastructure, including ApacheSolr search, version control API, and the much demanded plugin manager for secure, automated updating of module and themes.

Some of Drupal's major contributed modules will also gain, including Views as widgets, Views RDF/XML/JSON output, Views & CCK chart support, extensions to Nodequeue and OAuth support for Services.

There's also a healthy component of brand new functionality, including an image manipulation GUI, memetracker, bookings API, Icon module, document import module and Usability testing suite.

If you'd like to keep up on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2008 working group and help out in whatever ways you can. Also check out Planet SoC to read blog entries from Summer of Code students across all mentoring organizations.

Here's to another great summer! :) Read on to find more details about Drupal's accepted proposals.

read more

The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.
--Dries Buytaert, in Businessweek

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Also among the top innovators are Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, Joe Green of Causes, Drew Houston of Dropbox, David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, and others.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

read more

Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

read more

Szeged city view from the Tisza river

At this year's Drupalcon we're turning Szeged, Hungary into Drupaltown!

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Szeged, Hungary from August 27 to 30, 2008 in the Library and Conference Center of the Szeged University. With a thousand Drupal enthusiasts expected we'll be turning this picturesque student city into a true Drupaltown!

Drupalcon has been a major success for the Drupal community, with every conference reaching out to more and more people. Like Boston, Drupalcon Szeged will again provide ample opportunities both for business people, developers, themers, designers, and users in the community: there will be a code sprint, plenty of space for BOF sessions, a job fair and, of course, plenty of opportunity for networking. Start planning, buy your tickets early and be prepared to meet your Drupal community in Szeged, Hungary; Drupaltown!

read more

Given the success of David Mercer's first Drupal title for beginners, Packt has published a new and improved edition to go with the latest release of Drupal. The new book, still targetted at beginners and intermediates, builds on its predecessor to provide a steeper launching ramp for everyone who still feels they're not yet a pro.

Changes to the new version include:

• Slimmed down writing, to provide faster flowing and more concentrated information
• Updates to all the original text to reflect the enhanced features of D6
• Vastly expanded the range of topics
• Increased the depth and level of coverage for many topics

Despite the fact that I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained, the new version is over 330 pages. This gives you an idea of how much new material went into this edition in order to bring it up to speed with this most impressive of Drupal releases. This new book is as much an overhaul of the last as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

I hope that this title will meet the following goals that I have personally set for it:

1. To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club

read more

Spirit Library is library of spiritual messages and information. It contains thousands of articles/messages from spiritual speakers and authors which are filterable and sortable in different ways. The site extensively uses the excellent Panels 2 modules alongside Views.

This is the third incarnation of the site, and the one that finally gets very close to where we wanted to be with it. The first version was launched 18 months ago as a Plone site, as that was the CMS i had most experience with, but after a while it became too restrictive and we started looking in Drupals direction. For the second version we migrated the site from Plone, and the change coincided with a large jump in traffic and at the same time gave the vps it was hosted on more room as it used less server resources (especially memory).

read more

Myplay.com is a redesign and re-branding of Sony's Musicbox site which showcases SonyBMG's artists, providing free access to their videos, music and photos. Users can create lists of their favorite artists as well as review their music and embed widgets of their favorite artist's content into other sites. Sony Musicbox was originally implemented by the Lullabots who provided the base framework for this redesign. Thanks to their diligence and teaching as well as excellent tools provided by Earl Miles (Panels 2, Views and Nodequeue), three people (Suzi Arnold, Jerad Bitner and David Burns) were able to accomplish this task in just over a month.

This case study documents how the site is put together, and provides implementation details on how we've combined numerous important contributed modules to build a "next generation" Drupal site.

read more

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

If you're interested in learning more about how Mollom works, check out the 'How Mollom works' page and visit the Mollom FAQs for more details.

read more

Last year our beloved CMS was the overall winner of the Webware 100 Awards. By winning the competition, the Drupal Association got 5,000 Dollars that was used for amongst others funding Drupal Conferences and to buy hardware for hosting the Drupal infrastructure. But even better than the money, Drupal got more airtime and more and more people recognized the power of Drupal.

This year, Drupal was once again nominated in the category "Publishing" and you are encouraged to vote on Drupal to make sure we win again this year. Please help by spreading the word and vote, you deserve it!

Earlier today, Google announced their list of selected Google Summer of Code 2008 mentoring organizations, and we are pleased to inform the community that we have been selected once again. This will mark the Drupal project's fourth year of participation in this important program, which provides a great opportunity for the Drupal community to bring in talented new contributors, award existing long-term contributors, and get some exciting new coding projects done at the same time! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code FAQ and program timeline.

Some of Drupal's Summer of Code success stories include:

	Aron Novak, a two-time Summer of Code return champion who has done tremendous work on the FeedAPI module and now works for Development Seed.		Fabiano Sant'Ana (wundo), who maintains the widely-used CAPTCHA module recently started the first Brazilian Drupal shop.
	Rok ?lender, whose success on the SimpleTest automator led him to be one of those at the forefront of our efforts to integrate unit testing into core. He works full-time with Drupal at NowPublic.		Konstantin Käfer, also with NowPublic, continues to churn out great jQuery-enabled modules and important JavaScript core patches for Drupal.
	Angela Byron (webchick) who is now a consultant for high-profile Drupal websites with Lullabot and is on the board of directors for the Drupal Association.		Gábor Hojtsy, an existing Drupal contributor who was able to spend the summer doing extremely important work on i18n in Drupal core and tools for translators, and now spends his days as an engineer for Acquia.

So if you're:

• a post-secondary student looking for an exciting project with a thriving development community and tons of smart people you can work with
• an existing Drupal contributor who happens to be in college/university and would love a chance to get paid over the summer to work on the Next Big Drupal Thing
• a seasoned Drupal developer with some time over the summer, who'd truly enjoy mentoring and helping the next generation of contributors make Drupal the best that it can be
• a Drupal community member who might not have the time or coding experience to mentor, but knows where to find resources and enjoys helping others find them
• someone with a great project idea for an improvement in Drupal that would be perfect for a student to work on over the summer

...then there's something for you in Summer of Code! Read on to find out more. :)

read more

Following up on the Popular Science Case Study presented at DrupalCon Boston 2008 by Kevin Bridges (cyberswat), Laura Scott and others at pingVision, along with Megan Miller and John Mahoney of PopSci.com, here is a written case study on the development approaches for PopSci.com. We welcome your questions and feedback.

read more

DrupalCon just finished wrapping up and it has been an amazing week. Over 900 people attended over 50 sessions and over 30 Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. In the rooms and halls you could see knowledge virally spreading throughout the attendees as well as connections being made. DrupalCon may be over but don't let the knowledge sharing stop. Attend, Host, Create a local event to get this momentum going!

Here are a few great events coming up!

Sydney, Australia May 18th-22nd, 2008
Drupal Asia/Pacific Conference. The first major Drupal conference in Australia teamed up with CeBit.

Austin, Texas March 8th, 2008
BarCamp with Much Drupal love

Orlando, Florida April 5th-6th, 2008
Barcamp with much Drupal love

Paris, France April 19th
DrupalCamp2!

read more

*UPDATE* - This event's details have changed and has been postponed to a
new date. Please visit http://drupalapc.org for more details
The Australian Drupal community is pleased to announce that they will be holding their next large event in Sydney, Australia from May 18th ? 22nd 2008 at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Center Darling Harbor in conjunction with the Open CeBIT expo and conference.

The Drupal Asia Pacific Conference is a major event to gather Drupalers to learn, discuss and advance Drupal. It is also a great opportunity to network with other community members that operate in the Asia Pacific region and who may not be able to attend community events on the other side of the world.

The conference will feature dual tracks over 3 days and a single theatre over a day and half that will also be open to the broader Open CeBIT audience. We are partnering with the Joomla community to host a website building contest which will be prominently highlighted at the OpenCeBIT Conference. All attendees will be provided free entry to the CeBIT expo (20th ? 22nd) and offered discounted tickets to the Open CeBIT conference. We will also be hosting a booth as part of the CeBIT Exhibition to educate and promote Drupal to businesses, government, and individual attendees of the exhibition.

read more

Drupal 6.1, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

read more

The recent explosion of social networking sites has led to a rush to tap into new markets. A case in point at ISL (Insight + Strategy + Logic) is Red Room, an online community for writers of all stripes. The project is the brainchild of entrepreneur Ivory Madison. The goal of the site is to be the premier destination for authors to congregate with fans and discuss their books and ideas. Many high profile authors including Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini and Salman Rushdie have been on the site since day one.

While the Web has plenty of sites on which you can buy books, there is a paucity of places geared toward building dialogue about the books beyond what is necessary to move product. On many book-related sites, the authors themselves have largely been left out of the picture, leaving them to either establish their own limited Web presence or do without. This is a shame when you consider what could be on a good author website ? who better to blog than someone that makes a living spinning a good tale? Red Room offers every author the opportunity to easily build a presence to interact with their readers and with each other.

The client came at us with a list of features: blogging, comments and reviews, biographies, information about published works, event listings, streaming video, and podcasts. They required a robust, moderated, and extensible backend, with tagging and search tools to allow the user to navigate the large volume of content that thousands of writers would pump into the site. Most importantly, the site?s content generation tools needed to be easy to use by authors that wouldn?t necessarily have experience using technology.

read more

Letter from the Editor

We've all been waiting for it! After a year of development, Drupal 6 has finally been released. The general consensus among developers is that once CCK (nearly done) and Views (in progress) are complete, it will be ready for deployment on most sites. A large number of contributed modules depend on these two workhorses, which is why large chunks of CCK have been moved to core, and there is ongoing discussion around moving parts of Views there as well. Meanwhile, with Drupal 6 off their plates, developers are working around the clock to get your favorite modules ready for launch.

Boston DrupalCon is also around the corner. It would probably be enticing enough to attend just to hear Dries Buytaert's highly anticipated State of Drupal address (see last year's). But we have three stellar keynote speakers (Dries Buytaert, the original developer of Drupal; Chris Dibona, the open source program manager at Google; and Brian Aker, the director of architecture for MySQL)

With nearly a hundred volunteers, the Drupal Newsletter Team is committing itself to continue to bring high quality news and announcements from the world of Drupal. I have recently stepped up as an editor to help organize the effort, and we invite you to be part of this fantastic and dynamic group. March's newsletter is already in progress, so if you want to help contribute to that issue or join on an on-going basis, feel free to join us. We'd love to see your name in the bylines. As a sidenote, the Newsletter Team is also looking for a Druplicon mascot. We have a competition open at http://groups.drupal.org/node/8442, for any aspiring artists!

read more

Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link.

UPDATE: Huge congratulations to our GHOP equally-as-awesome winners! Read about it on the Google Open Source Blog!

Also see the official GHOP grand prize winners announcement.

The GHOP contest officially ended on February 4, 2008. This contest was an absolutely amazing success, and resulted in a number of new contributors to the Drupal project. If you're interested in learning more about the contest, there was a recent Lullabot podcast about GHOP, and there will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months, and would like to talk to a few of the students face-to-face.

• Peter Cawley (Corsix) was selected as Drupal's GHOP grand prize winner, and will receive a paid travel to Google campus in Mountain View, California in early May, along with the GHOP winners from other projects. Peter completed a whopping 15 tasks, his greatest accomplishment being the creation of the awesome new Flexifilter module, which allows site builders to create custom input filters without having to write code and/or install a new module for each new filter. This module was envisioned by fellow GHOP student cwgordon7, and mentored by a Drupal contributor too young to take part in GHOP, dmitrig01. Way to go, Corsix!!! :D
• Peter will be accompanied on his trip to Google by Adam Light (aclight), who did a tremendous job handling the administration of the GHOP contest, as well as helping students and mentors alike with GHOP tasks.
• We'd also like to extend our congratulations to everyone who participated, including our equally-as-awesome winners, Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7), Edward Z. Yang (ezyang), Jimmy Berry (boombatower), Wilson Lee (kourge), and Dmitri G. (dmitrig01) (who was too young to participate in GHOP, but helped a lot with mentoring and administration, and so was named honorary winner :)).
• A total of 130 tasks were completed, ranging from new and upgraded modules, enhancements to existing modules, much-needed documentation, helpful videocasts, beautiful marketing materials, and more. Almost half of those were completed during the last month of the program.
• We had a total of 54 awesome student participants during the course of GHOP, of which 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest. Amazing!
• The leaders in terms of raw task numbers were Corsix (15), boombatower (12), ezyang (10), cwgordon7 (9), and kourge (9), but we also benefited from several students who took on only a few tasks and knocked them out of the park. Most of our GHOP students are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community. :)
• Thanks to everyone for all of the great community support we've received during this contest! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

What comes next, now that GHOP is over? DROP! Read on to find out more, and also to see a list of the tasks completed since our last status report.

read more

The release of Drupal 6 isn't the only big news in February -- this week also marks the launch of a newly redesigned, Drupal-powered FastCompany.com! Fast Company Magazine has covered cutting edge business and tech industry news since the heady days of the early 90's, and the massive redesign of the magazine's site was a major undertaking for its publisher, Mansueto Digital.

The new site combines the magazine's print content with web-exclusive features, integrates the social features of Fast Company's long-running Company Of Friends business network, and gives members tools to filter through the web's river of news to find business topics they're interested in.

How was it built? Teams from Lullabot, Achieve Internet, Advomatic and Tree House Interactive worked together with Mansueto's internal development team to translate existing specs and wireframes into a working Drupal site. Views, CCK, BuddyList, and Organic Groups form the backbone of the site's structure, and a host of off-the-shelf contrib modules were used to add additional functionality. Examples include Views Fastsearch, used to build customized search screens for specific sections of the site, and the SimpleFeed module, which pulls in the content for each user's customizable news feed.

read more

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

Today, Drupal powers sites including the homepages of Warner Brothers Records, The New York Observer, Fast Company, Popular Science, and Amnesty International and project sites by SonyBMG, Forbes, Harvard University, and more. Drupal can be used to create personal weblogs (Tim Berners-Lee), deliver podcasts (TWIT.tv), connect online communities (SpreadFireFox.com), form artist collectives (Terminus 1525) or inform the masses (The Onion).

read more

What will it take for Drupal to break through to be the most popular platform for websites? Drupal needs better marketing. Specifically Drupal needs more showcase sites and case studies to help evaluators understand what can be done with Drupal. We've already got a good list of case studies, success stories, featured sites, and a list of show case sites. To help rally the community, there will be a Drupal site showcase and case study contest at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon.

Go on over to the Drupalcon Boston site to submit your favorite sites and view and vote for the best ones.

read more

Even though we are all currently very excited about DrupalCon Boston 2008 the Drupal Association is planning ahead to help coordinate the following DrupalCon for the Fall/Winter of 2008 in Europe. We mention Europe specifically since that has become a bit of a tradition, but if anyone would like to organize a conference in another location please draft and submit a proposal.

Request for Proposals

The Drupal Association is currently requesting proposals from aspiring DrupalCon organizers for the 2008 DrupalCon Europe. If you would like to organize a DrupalCon in your country please contact the association and submit a proposal that meets the criteria of the DrupalCon proposal guidelines

read more

We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota Libraries are partnering with the Drupal development community on the first round of formal usability testing for the Drupal open source content management platform, to take place in February 2008.

• Testing will be conducted at the University's Office for Information Technology?s usability lab with the generous support of Usability Services.
• Seven Drupal community members, including project lead Dries Buytaert, will be on-site as members of the usability test team.
• Results will be presented at Drupalcon Boston, where we?ll discuss future directions indicated by the test results as well as next steps for further usability testing.
• To get involved or to learn more, see this post in the Usability Group.

Our goal is to provide the Drupal development community with a baseline picture of Drupal’s usability for common user tasks. In doing so, the University Libraries hope to improve user experience in a new generation of Drupal-based tools for discovering, managing, and sharing information.

read more

Drupal 6 has been in a code freeze for more than 6 months and is almost ready to be released now. We're only a few bug fixes away from the first final Drupal 6.0 release. Therefore, I just created the DRUPAL-6 CVS branch for Drupal core. This means that while Drupal 6 is being finalized and we prepare for the Drupal 6.0 release, we'll also start accepting new features and improvements for Drupal 7, the next major version of Drupal.

For maximum effectiveness, feature requests for Drupal 7, should go in the the list of feature requests. In my State of Drupal presentation in Barcelona I hinted about what would be the killer Drupal 7 release according to a survey I conducted. While that list is not exclusive and nothing but a wishlist (not a deliverable), it might be worth a look if you want to help shape the future of Drupal.

read more

Incredible Momentum

Drupalcon Boston 2008 is shaping up to be the biggest and best Drupalcon ever. We crunched some numbers this week to compare the pace of registrations between Boston and Barcelona and found that registrations for Boston are running 50% higher than Barcelona at the equivalent stage of the registration cycle (~225 vs. ~150).? That's incredible momentum, and as long as we have the expected surge in registrations over the next two weeks we'll be in great shape to hit our goal of 500+ attendees.

By Feb 11: Submit Your Session Proposal

Many great sessions have already been submitted. But not enough. So we're setting the session submission deadline for February 11 at 11 p. m. Eastern time (04:00 GMT). If you've been thinking about submitting a session, it's time to put fingers to keyboard and make it happen. And if you are expecting a specific session by a specific person but don't see it on the listings on the site, then please pester the presenter to get the session on the agenda.

By Feb 18: Get Registered, Pay, and Book Hotel

If you haven't registered AND paid your fee (need to be logged in), then the time is now. We've reserved a bunch of hotel rooms at discounted rates. But they go away on February 18 - we can't expect the hotel to hold them forever. So if you want to get a great room at a great rate, you need to get moving.

read more