Drupal.org

As Drupal 6 matures, we are entering an exciting time for its users and developers. Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2 both have release candidates, and most of your favorite modules have either already been upgraded, or are well on their way. This summer has seen a lot of activity, such as the nearly 20 projects of the Google Summer of Code, and there are great things planned, such as the highly anticipated Drupalcon Szeged. We have seen two Drupal books published by Packt, with a third on the way, and Lullabot released the first DVD of their new Lullabot Learning Series.

Read on for a quick overview of the Drupal News and upcoming events!

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In the last couple of weeks we received a lot of positive feedback on the usefulness of our consolidated registration system. People found it really easy that they didn't have to go contact receptionists to see in what hotels rooms were still available. On July 24th we are closing our accommodation service, so if you want to have us organize a hotel for you, you should register for the conference the coming week! You will still be able to see the hotel listing online, but you will have to organize everything yourself.

Drupalcon Szeged is again pulling a very international public. So far we have registered attendees from 35 countries. Hungary has a narrow lead with 43 participants, but is closely followed by the US with 40 and Germany with 35 registered participants. Next in line are Great-Britain, The Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden with 28, 20, 18 and 15 participants respectively (these statistics do not include people who didn't fill in their bio). There are 6 weeks left until the conference so there is still time to put a banner on your blog and get more people in your country to attend Drupalcon.

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Packt has launched the third annual Open Source CMS Award today, giving fans of Drupal an opportunity to help them defend their title, which they won last year, collecting a first prize of $5,000.

The first stage of the Award is a call for nominations, which enables fans to nominate their favourite Open Source CMS. The five Content Management System's that receive the most nominations in each category will go through to the final stage of voting, which starts at the beginning of September, so your nomination counts!

To ensure that Drupal makes it through to the final voting stage, submit your nomination for Drupal here: www.PacktPub.com/article/nominate-overall-open-source-cms-winner/system/Drupal

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Drupal is in the running as a finalist for the SourceForge 2008 Community awards in 5 categories. Voting ends on Friday.

1. Best project
2. Best project for Enterprise
3. Best project for Educators
4. Best Tool or Utility for Developers
5. Most Likely to Change the World

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digg_url = 'http://digg.com/business_finance/CaribbeanResumes_com_just_launched';

Caribbean Resumes just launched - It's is a
little monster.com that is geared towards providing a job portal for all the recruitment, career advice and hiring needs for Caribbean residents.

The following details how I built the site, including the history, overall design approach, what modules were used, and more.

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Drupal 6.3 and Drupal 5.8, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Drupal 6.3 also includes some changes to the installer to prevent file ownership issues on shared hosts; upgrades jQuery to version 1.2.6; improves PostreSQL compatibility; fixes performance issues in search, menu and form API and contains a variety of other small improvements. It should also be noted that the Views for Drupal 6 release candidate requires Drupal 6.3 to run properly.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases, 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, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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Aaron Winborn, of Advomatic and Embedded Media Field fame, has completed writing Drupal Multimedia, to be published by Packt Publishing this September (and you can pre-order now)! Packt will be donating a portion of the royalties to the Drupal Association, in keeping with their long-standing policy of supporting the Open Source community.

Written for Drupal 6, this book is a comprehensive overview of integrating multimedia into your Drupal-powered web site. With hands-on examples and tutorials, the book is written for site developers, themers, and administrators. The book makes no assumptions about your skill level, although one should probably already have an understanding of Drupal and how to set up and configure a basic site. The book will guide you through its topics, gently moving the reader from basic concepts such as module set-up, to intermediate techniques such as creating views, to advanced methods such as writing jQuery and custom modules.

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Mid-terms for Google Summer of Code 2008 are upon us. We have 19 students and over 40 mentors working tirelessly to bring you fantastic code ranging from new design tools, to fantastic new APIs, to improvements to existing modules such as Views and NodeQueue. Read on to meet the students behind SoC, and actually test out preliminary alpha versions of their projects yourselves! Make sure to log feedback to the projects' issue queues. :)

For more information about Summer of Code, see the SoC 2008 group on groups.drupal.org.

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The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is one of the world's premier art museums, best-known for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. In addition to housing famous paintings such as Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles and Grant Wood's American Gothic, the Museum also has world-class collections of photography, arms and armor, ceramic figures, portrait sculptures, miniatures, and galleries of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, including the mummy of Paankhenamun.

Palantir.net has worked with AIC since 2005, when we helped them develop and implement their site redesign and CMS integration. Their existing site only showed a small selection of material from their collection; the goal of this project was to integrate the site with their backend asset management system to allow users to browse the Museum's entire collection online, as well as allow the Museum to quickly and easily create micro-sites to promote exhibitions.

Palantir worked on the AIC Collections site in collaboration with design partner Studio Blue, who provided the original design direction for the AIC Web site. Larry Garfield (Crell) and Colleen Carroll were the joint architects of the site, with Larry working as lead programmer and Colleen as lead themer. Tiffany Farriss provided strategic leadership for the project.

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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!

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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 are fixed in the Drupal 6.3 release, please use that.

More details about these pivotal module releases follow...

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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...

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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.

• 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

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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 July 1st, we are giving away the tickets for 80 EURO. So better make sure you don't miss that deadline!

See you in Drupaltown!

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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.

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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

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.

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Last week, I released thevintageaviator.co.nz. It was probably one of the most challenging Drupal sites I've ever done, but also the best so far. It's a presentation of a local WW1 Warplane workshop, containing build stories, reference material, and thousands of great images of plane reproductions and archive materials.

The build story is a long one, mostly because the requirements shifted along the way quite a bit. This story is targeted at current Drupal site developers who are interested in the tools and techniques used. Mostly to head off the "so how did you do that?" questions we get whenever we do a write-up :-)

However among the interesting thing for developers and designers will be the complex layered look, the way this layout was optimized to scale to all screen sizes, and the surgery I did to Drupal to make this all happen.

Initial feedback we've received so far has been overwhelmingly positive (save some justified grumbles about the page weight) and I'd like to share this case study.

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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

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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

Real map after the break.

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