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338 people signed up already for Drupalcon Szeged!
Earlier this week we have closed our special 80 Euro early bird offer with 335 registered participants! A great big thank you to all the people that already signed up!
With 8 more weeks to go we thought it was a good time to do some preliminary evaluation about our progress. We took the sign-up data from the past four Drupalcons and compared that with what we have so far. As was to be expected there has been some "nice action" in the last week of the first early bird offer. (Note that the registration was twice as long in Barcelona, so the numbers shown here are the sums from week 1 and 2; 3 and 4; 5 and 6).
In our third week we had 185 new sign ups of which over a hundred happened on the last day of the early bird offer. We didn't achieve Sunnyvale's peak signups of week two (212 signups), but our total of 335 registered participants did set a new record for the total amount of participants registered after three weeks of registration!
Views 2, CCK 2, and Organic Groups Release Candidates now available for Drupal 6!
We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC). Many months of work have gone into extensive rewrites of these modules, leading to major improvements that will make Drupal 6 an even more attractive platform for building websites.
As always, you should upgrade these modules on a test site first, and make sure to make a complete backup. You never know how your site's customizations will affect things, or what silly little thing nobody else caught.
IMPORTANT! There are a couple Drupal core bugs that could affect anyone using Views and anyone updating from an earlier version of CCK. They will be fixed in the Drupal 6.3 release, whenever it gets issued. Until then, you must use http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.x-dev.tar.gz the latest development release of core.
More details about these pivotal module releases follow...
New Drupal DVD/Video - Understanding Drupal
Understanding Drupal is the first video in The Lullabot Learning Series. This video provides an overview of Drupal as a content management system, as a PHP web application framework, and as a developer community. Its documentary-style exploration covers all the terminology and fundamental concepts for both site administrators and developers. If you've ever been confused by Drupal or are still trying to wrap your head around the community and platform, this video is intended as a roadmap to accelerate your journey up the Drupal learning curve.
Lullabots Addison Berry (add1sun), Angela Byron (webchick), Jeff Eaton (eaton), Nathan Haug (quicksketch), Jeff Robbins (jjeff), James Walker (walkah), and Matt Westgate (matt westgate) sit down to tell us about Drupal in this video directed and edited by Kent Bye (kentbye). A portion of the profits from this video will be donated directly to the Drupal Association.
Topics include...
Drupal usability tests from the University of Baltimore with community solutions
The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students in the Research Methods class, taught by professor Kathryn Summers, have completed a usability study on Drupal. The Drupal community has been working with Becca Scollan in the usability group.
The usability research used video recordings and eye tracking tools to follow participants gaze in the Drupal interface. The study used eight participants, which is considered a valid sample. The study duplicated some tests done in usability testing at the University of Minnesota, and confirmed several results.
Fixing the usability problems
Core issues from both studies
- WYSIWYG in core: WYSIWYG group, Better input format support in Drupal 7
- Evaluators said that "content" was used too often in too many contexts and that was confusing: content, post, node , Change "story" content type to "article" or "news", Content types descriptions tweaks
Time until Monday to register for 80 EUR!
Drupalcon registration is running like crazy, 2 weeks after we opened the registration we are nearing 150 registered participants!
We got a lot of positive feedback from all over the community, especially for the registration system that Gábor Hojtsy and János Kuszing pieced together. This is what Dries said after he registered:
I had to share this: I just completed my DrupalCon Szeged registration. The conference organization and the registration system on the website are truly remarkable. Keep up the great work!
Several people told us that they were really pleased that they can book their hotel and shuttle bus from the Drupalcon site. Beware though, rooms are going really fast so if you want some choice you better be quick!
What you'll get for your money? 4 days of conference in a really cool venue with 4 tracks, plenty of BoF's, 4 exhibitions, plenty of (Drupal) fun, a codesprint and of course some serious shoulder rubbing with the developers of your favorite core and contributed modules. If you are new to Drupal it is the best opportunity to level up your knowledge. Don't miss THE community event this fall!
Until Monday June 30th, we are selling the tickets for 80 EURO. So better make sure you don't miss that deadline!
See you in Drupaltown!
Drupal Licensing FAQ published
For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal's licensing status. Is it GPL version 2? Are we moving to GPL version 3? Could we even if we wanted to? Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]? As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.
Understanding licensing, and the differences between licenses, is more important than some realize. Open source is not the same as public domain. Open source and Free Software requires that source code be made available and that others are allowed to make use and share of the source code, but there are rules attached to how they can do so just as there is with proprietary software. For example, not all open source software can be combined, and there are requirements for how you distribute the source code of a program. Knowing which of those rules apply to Drupal, and to Drupal modules and themes, is important not only for the health of the code base (so we know what we can and can't do with the work of over a thousand people) but also to the health of the growing commercial Drupal economy.
I am pleased to announce that we now do have firm answers to these questions, and have a new and shiny FAQ up to answer them. There is nothing new in the FAQ; it is just a clarification of some edge cases that didn't used to exist.
We'd like to thank James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center for his help in working out the details. We also wanted to take a few moments to go into some of the reasoning behind how we reached a few of these conclusions.
Search on Drupal.org disabled during high load
UPDATE: Google search is now offered when Drupal search block is disabled. Details. We are also working on installing Xapian, and other open source search engines locally on the Drupal.org infrastructure.
When the site gets too busy, the infrastructure team sometimes disables the built-in search function. When this happens, you can use Google to search by putting site:drupal.org in with your query. There are also a couple of unofficial sites mentioned in the comments below. The issue to discuss how best to handle providing an alternate search is here. Comments have been disabled on this post because they were becoming unproductive. If you are able to help with the problem, please do so via that issue. Please note that saying "someone" needs to do "something" will not be any more helpful on that issue. We are already well aware of that.
Michelle
Registration for Drupalcon Szeged is open!
This Wednesday we opened the registration for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 and some of the early birds are already in! If you sign up before the end of June you will be able to buy your ticket at the extra discounted price of 80 EUR. From July the price will increase to 120 EUR, from August on to 160 EUR and just before and during the conference it will be 200 EUR to attend. We also help you get a hotel room and buy shuttle bus tickets until July 24, so if you'd like to go the easy way, make sure to register by then.
A week ago we published the sponsor packages. We received positive feedback from several companies and we already sold our first platinum package! As you might have noticed we only have 3 gold and 4 platinum packages available this Drupalcon. So if you want to get the exclusive benefits of these packages and get your company's name on one of our BoF or session rooms, contact us as soon as possible. To make the conference a huge success again, we will need your help: if you know a company that could be interested in sponsoring Drupalcon please get in touch!
We also opened session submission last week. If you have a topic that you would like to present this Drupalcon please fill in the form. Our track chairs will then evaluate your proposal and choose the sessions that will become part of the conference tracks. Session submission will be open until the last week of July. You can also submit BoF session proposals for our unconference program. This Drupalcon we are going to have 3 bigger rooms for larger BoFs (and an open space for smaller ones), so make sure to get the word out about your plans and spark interest in them sooner then later.
Drupalcon North America 2009, Drupalcon Europe 2009 as well as Drupalcon [place your idea here] are being planned right now. If you would like to have a Drupalcon in your town please let us know by submitting a formal proposal. If you have questions regarding the submission process feel free to contact the Drupal Association and someone will help you.
Vote for Drupal on SourceForge.net!
SourceForge.Net is a site which strongly believes in Open Source and what it stands for, in much the same way as the Drupal Community. Every year they host a competition where their community votes for their favourite packages and this year is no different. After reading through the Program Information I cannot see any reason why we shouldn't try to get Drupal up there ("Any open source project of any kind can be nominated by anyone (yes, that means you!) to be a finalist in any category" - from their website).
On their site they say "This is for the prize" in regard to voting, however I'm not completely sure if the prize is simply winning or if there is some financial gain for the Drupal Association.
So, lets try to get Drupal nominated for an award on Sourceforge.Net...
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-nominate
Worldwide map of local Drupal groups
In preparation for a web seminar with Drupal local group organizers in the North and South American time zones on Monday June 9th 5PM PDT, I've updated a map with Drupal local groups. Full Map
New Drupal Book: Learning Drupal 6 Module Development
Developing new modules for Drupal 6? Porting older modules? Packt Publishing has just released a new book, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, by Matt Butcher. This book is targeted toward PHP programmers interested in Drupal 6 module development.
The book takes a hands-on approach. Each chapter walks through the development of a module, theme, or installation profile. As the reader progresses through the book, she or he will be able to create increasingly sophisticated Drupal modules.
If you're new to Drupal development (but have PHP development experience), this book will get you developing modules right away. Are you a more seasoned Drupal developer just looking to get some modules updated? This book focuses on many of the new features, changes, and improvements made in Drupal 6. Check out the sample chapter Creating Our First Module (1.3M PDF) to get a feel for how the book is written.
New Drupal Book - Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce
Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is Packt's new book, written by Michael Peacock, aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. With more and more websites aiming to integrate all of their components to give a more slick and streamlined effect for users - by using Drupal e-Commerce, the site and the store are already integrated providing both a powerful website and a powerful online store.
Drupal sites win 9 Horizon Interactive awards for studio:module and pingVision
The Horizon Interactive Awards winners were announced over the past weekend. Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Several Drupal-powered sites, developed by studio:module and pingVision were among the winners.
Announcing Drupal's Summer of Code 2008 projects and students
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.
Drupal wins 2008 Webware 100 award
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.
Businessweek picks Dries Buytaert as a 2008 top innovator
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.
Drupal 6.2 released, fixing security issues
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.
New Drupal Book Published: Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer
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:
- To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club
Announcing Drupalcon Szeged 2008
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!
Mollom, my content monitoring startup
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.
Vote for Drupal, the best Open Source CMS
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!
Drupal back for another round of Google Summer of Code 2008!
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:
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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. |
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Rok Žlender, 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. |
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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. :)
Announcing the 2008 Drupal Asia Pacific Conference
*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.
Boston DrupalCon is over, Stay Involved!
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!
Drupalcon Boston is sold out. No on-site admission will be available.
Drupalcon Boston 2008 is now sold out. If you are not listed as an attendee or you have not received an invoice and/or email from the Drupalcon organizers you will not be able to attend Drupalcon Boston. We apologize. The organizers thought that doubling the Barcelona capacity for the next conference 6 months later would have been sufficient. Silly us.
Funny, sad, or serious excuses for missing Drupalcon registration will be reviewed by the Drupalcon organizers, but cannot result in admittance.
Drupal 6.1 fixing security issues released
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.
GHOP Final Status Report
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 :)).
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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.
Drupal 6.0 released
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 http://drupal.org/project/issues?projects=3060&versions=97368,219510,216... --> 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).
Drupal 6.0 RC4 released
We are proud to present the fourth release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Building on the extensive testing of the third release candidate, we have discovered and fixed a number of critical issues, including errors during search indexing in languages with accented characters, the display of unpublished content in menus and book outlines, and localized menu data being saved into the database. Thanks to the cooperation between the jQuery and Drupal communities, we have also updated the version of jQuery to be included with Drupal 6 to the latest 1.2.3 release. I want to publicly thank jQuery's John Resig and his team for providing a new jQuery release in time for Drupal 6!
Although I had hoped that the third release candidate would be our last before Drupal 6's official release, our priority is to ensure that Drupal 6 is the fastest, most stable, and feature-filled version of Drupal yet. We've translated your experiences with the previous release candidates (including my own upgrade of drupal.hu) into a number of bug fixes, and will be watching closely for any other last-minute issues. I'm again hopeful that this will be the final release candidate before the official release of Drupal 6.0.
The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so this announcement will concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!
DrupalCon 2008, Request for Proposal Deadline
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
Drupal Partners with U of M Libraries - Formal Lab Usability Testing of D6
Drupal Usability Testing
An evaluator at the usability lab reviews a site.
Eye tracking technology helps identify points of interest.
Heat maps indicate site usage patterns.
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.
Development open for Drupal 7
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.
DEADLINE ALERT: Time for Action on Drupalcon Boston 2008
All Star General Session Speakers
We've lined up some incredible general session speakers. These guys rock, and hearing from them is reason enough by itself to come to Drupalcon.
Monday March 3: Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead and Acquia CTO and his traditional "The State of Drupal" speech
Tuesday March 4: Chris DiBona, Google Open Source Program Manager
Wednesday March 5: Brian Aker, Director of Architecture at MySQL AB
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).ﾠ 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.
All day code sprint at Drupalcon Boston
After Drupalcon (March 3-6 at the Boston Convention & Expo Center), the Drupal Association is hosting an all day code sprint at MIT on Friday March 7. All registered attendees are welcome. See below for details.
What’s a code sprint
A code sprint is a gathering of a bunch of programmers to complete a short, rapid development project. It allows developers from different countries and companies to work together and learn from each other. Most importantly, it’s a fun event where we can make some impressive advances for Drupal.
We’re all meeting in a big room, where we’ll code and talk smack until we get kicked out. Come chat with long-time Drupalers to learn from their experience.
Drupal Data Architecture Design Sprint, Feb 4-6 2008 in Chicago
Several Drupal developers are meeting February 4-6, 2008 in Chicago to work on and re-design Drupal's core data architecture. Topics will include data APIs, object modeling, fields in core, and an overlapping swirl of related ideas. Our goal is to have a design proposal for presentation at DrupalCon Boston 2008.