Drupal

Lullabot is pleased to announce the largest independent Drupal event ever. Do It With Drupal is a 3-day seminar focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities.

The event is geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience. For new developers and decision-makers, DIWD will offer a great introduction to Drupal and the Drupal community. For more experienced Drupalers, DIWD will offer a great chance to pick up tips and tricks straight from the experts and a chance to connect and socialize with other Drupal professionals.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar will feature the following highlights:

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Some of you may have noticed we recently gave the Bryght hosting system a facelift and added some functionality under the hood. Bryght Drupal hosting combines a custom install profile with a tuned hosting environment, incorporating best practices used on Drupal.org, to make a fully functional, out-of-the-box VPS.

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After a week of delay due to DrupalCON related travel, it is time for our monthly open review meeting. We will meet for the next round of proposal reviews on Thursday, September 11th at 14:00 Eastern (US) (18:00 UTC).

The meeting will be held in IRC #drupal-dojo on irc.freenode.net. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information about using IRC.) We will meet for 1:30 with the following agenda:

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At the end of 2007, Aten Design Group worked with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to deploy iCitizenForum.com, a Drupal website about Citizenship. The following case study documents some of the factors that led to choosing Drupal, and outlines the technical approach for the project.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation operates the world's largest living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. The foundation preserves and interprets a 301-acre Historic Area; operates museums, outreach programs, and the John D. Rockefeller Library; and carries out important research and archaeology pertaining to the origins of America. In accordance with its mission, "That the Future May Learn from the Past", the foundation is concerned not only with recreating the 18th-century experience, but with facilitating education about the idea of America–both in its beginnings, and in its relevance for the future.

iCitizenForum.com, a website that promotes discussion around the topic of Citizenship, is a fitting extension of this core mission.

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Now that everyone is (hopefully) recovered from Drupalcon Szeged, I wanted to create one more front page post with a roadmap for the portion of the redesign project involving Mark Boulton Design. Mark and Leisa provided insight into their approach to the redesign in their keynote and really built up excitement and enthusiasm for the project. I highly recommend it to anyone even a teensy bit interested in the redesign process. Over the next three months (September 2008 – December 2008), the d.o redesign team will be tackling:

• User research
• Revised information architecture
• Content audit and editing
• Wireframes
• Usability testing
• Brand style guide
• Finalized design .psd

To be sure, they have a lot of work ahead of them. No worries – they’re totally on it! However, it also should not be underestimated how much work is ahead of us, the community. Again, I’m not worried, but it’s important that everyone is clear that the scope of the work we’ve contracted MBD to do is only the beginning.

The community will be the driving force in the redesign of Drupal.org and the Redesign Group will be the central hub for all interested. Be a part of it.

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Last year Drupal won 2007 Best Overall Open Source CMS. That was before we released Drupal 6.

This year, Drupal 6 was nominated for best CMS in two categories. Please help us by voting for Drupal in both of them:

• Best Overall Open Source CMS
• Best PHP Open Source CMS

"Following six weeks of intense voting, Packt can now exclusively reveal the Content Management Systems that have made the final of the four different categories. With the final voting stage opening on September 1, the competition is likely to be strong with new CMS's joining some of the more established names in each category to compete for a share of the $20,000 prize money."

"As usual, judging comes from a panel of experienced and respected figures from the Content Management and Open Source industry. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.

The final judge is made up of votes from customers and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. You have the chance to support your favourite CMS by submitting a vote when the final five are announced."

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Drupal Essential Training

with: Tom Geller (Publishers bio)

...is now live in the Online Training Library at Lynda.com! Contact me privately via email or comment here if you have a well-known site and would like to publish a review of the full series, and I'll do my best to get you a DVD or free site pass. (It's normally $25/month for access to all their videos, which I think is a really good deal.)

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Another amazing Drupalcon has come to an end. Thank you to everyone that made the journey to the beautiful town of Szeged, Hungary. We truly turned this city into DrupalTown! Drupal folks covered every part of the town making it difficult to get away from them but who would want to! The amount of talks, connections, and learning that happened at this conference was amazing. This community is truly awesome!

But we're not stopping! Drupalcon North America has been decided and will happen in the March/April timeframe in the United States. We are not announcing the location or exact dates until the final contracts are signed, but watch for them on the Drupal.org front page! Start saving now!

By the way, did you attend Drupalcon Szeged? Couldn't make it?
Tell us about it in the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 Survey.

Although Drupalcon Szeged may be over and Drupalcon North America isn't for another seven months, that doesn't mean you have to wait to meet your fellow Drupallers. The following camps are occurring around the world in the next several weeks. Find more listed over at groups.drupal.org/events:
Sept. 6th-7th Victoria Canada DrupalCamp and Beerfest!

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The much-anticipated second edition of Pro Drupal Development has shipped! Newly updated and revised for Drupal 6, it includes more than 200 pages of additional content covering the Actions API for automating complex operations, the Batch API tools for managing long or complex processes, and other new tools. As with the first edition, it covers important foundational issues like building modules, working with FormAPI and the node system, using Drupal's search tools, and more. Purchases of the book made through its web site also benefit the Drupal Association.

When Pro Drupal Development was first released in 2007, it was a runaway success, hitting the Amazon.com top 100 in just a few days. As critical tools like Views, CCK, and Drupal are shipping for Drupal 6, the book's release should help give another important boost to the Drupal development community.

DrupalSN.com (Drupal Social Network) is a Social Network website about Drupal and built with Drupal. It is engineered from the ground up by thomjjames with a tiny bit of help from BioALIEN in getting this write up polished and published on the Drupal front page.

DrupalSN is essentially a Drupal showcase both in terms of the site itself and also as a place where Drupal developers and designers can showcase their Drupal projects all in one place. I hope Drupal developers and designers will use the site as a way to gain exposure to complement their portfolio.

It's also meant to be a fun place where people can interact and see how Drupal can effectively be used for a social network. I hope the site can compliment Drupal.org and Groups.Drupal.org in a fun and different way but ultimately the goal is to promote Drupal!

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"Drupal in Libraries" is the subject of the May / June edition of Library Technology Reports. (http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/drupal-in-libraries.html) Authors Andy Austin (aaustin) and Chris Harris (cgharris) present an overview of Drupal for the library audience hoping to show why and how libraries can get started using Drupal.

Library Technology Reports is published by ALA Techsource, a unit of the publishing department of the American Library Association. The ALA Techsource website also runs on Drupal.

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Update, August 20: After some more sponsors have come forward (thank you!), Drupalcon Szeged now needs about €10,000 of new sponsorship to meet costs.

Looking for a way to show your support for Drupal? Easy: sponsor the upcoming European Drupalcon. You'll be helping to fund critically important work--and increasing your exposure and profile in the community at the same time.

Drupalcon is the single largest source of revenue for the Drupal Association, the non-profit that supports Drupal. Sponsorship revenues make it possible for us to tackle key Association priorities, from protecting the legal integrity of the Drupal codebase to improving the infrastructure driving drupal.org.

Revenue from past Drupalcons is directly funding pressing projects like our top priority this year: improving the drupal.org website. Sponsoring Drupalcon is a direct and concrete way to financially support the Association's work.

Sponsoring Drupalcon is not just a way to support important work promoting the Drupal platform. It's also an opportunity for exposure and profile in the Drupal community.

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Drupal 6.4 and Drupal 5.10, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

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 Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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The Drupal Association is pleased to announce the selection of a design partner in its Drupal.org redesign efforts. Through a competitive process, UK-based Mark Boulton Design Ltd. was selected. Their proposal stood out because of their work on Coolspotters and the upcoming Standaard.be (launching Q4 2008), their agile design approach and their highly-experienced project team including Mark Boulton as Creative Director and project lead, Leisa Reichelt as Information Architect & UX Research and Carolyn Wood as Content Strategist.

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South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual festival and conference held every spring in Austin, Texas, dedicated to bringing together creative indviduals from around the world for a week-long celebration of music, film, and interactive technology. The interactive portion of the festival features over 150 panel discussions on cutting-edge topics in the new media industry and culture, as well as a trade show, Web Awards Competition, video game tournament, and some great after-parties.

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There has been a lot of work going on in the Docs team lately and we want to share that with the larger community. The biggest news that will impact everyone is that we are in the process of creating a new top-level handbook to be added to drupal.org, called "Getting Involved." It will be listed along with the other handbooks on the main Documentation landing page as well as be the new target for the Contribute tab. We have also been working on other plans and ideas to collaborate on the docs. Here is a run down of the cool stuff we have to shout about.

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I've been working with Gábor for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding. In the picture below, you can see some of the Drupal people that were present.

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The Knight News Challenge Garage launched (beta) today. In the press release, the site is described:

Fifty coaches are standing by online to help innovative thinkers apply for the Knight News Challenge, a $5 million-a-year contest to move journalism into the 21st Century. The coaches — made up of past jurors and winners — will give News Challenge hopefuls a better chance of winning up to $5 million in prizes annually. They also hope to attract a more diverse range of ideas.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has funded the contest with $25 million over five years. Its goal is to discover new ways of using digital technology to meet the information needs of geographic communities. Last year’s contest received 3,000 applications. It named 16 winners.

The new “Knight News Challenge “Garage” mentoring site can be accessed online at garage.newschallenge.org. “With this incubator site we are taking a page from technology companies,” says Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation’s journalism program officer. “We hope that the Garage coaches will extend the contest’s reach beyond the journalism field. We want to attract more applicants from technical communities, such as the social media arena. Another goal is to improve the overall quality of applications.”

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We have just published our draft session schedule for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 yesterday based on feedback from you, the track chair selections and available rooms and timeslots. While building up the program, we took great care to find enough time for attendees to network, discuss code and business.

The unconference never received so much attention at Drupalcons. We set aside three workshop rooms for bigger BoFs, and now allow you to schedule your BoFs yourselves way in advance. It was a popular request to be able to know the unconference program before the event for easier planning (even though this goes against the unconference definition a bit). While BoF speakers can modify their placement whenever they see appropriate (even on the day their BoF would be held), the pre-scheduling possibility might help you gauge the wealth of program available on this event. You will be able to submit and schedule new BoF proposals on the spot in Szeged, but submitting earlier will help you get more attention to your topic.

Some early quotes we have heard about our program include Peter Wolanin of Acquia saying yesterday: Hmm, I might have to cancel all my BoFs - too many sessions I want to see! and Mikkel Høgh of Peytz & Co tweeting just took a look at the tentative Drupalcon schedule [...] – so much to see, so little time. It's going to be hard to pick….

Now that the program is out and unconference sessions are put into place, we thought you might decide easier to attend Drupalcon. So to make it a trivial decision, we extended our discount on tickets until this Friday. You can still buy 120 EUR tickets for Drupalcon today and tomorrow. If you are still not among those registered, don't miss the opportunity now!

At last but not least, some sponsor spots are still available and we are now selling booths at the different exhibitions as well. If your company would like to reach the hundreds of Drupal people at the event, or would like the developers among them to resell your hosting or other services to their customers, you should sign up as soon as possible to get into our booklet and have maximum impact.

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Drupal received high scores in a satisfaction report by NTEN, a major Non-profit Technology organization. Drupal was evaluated in five categories, and had the highest number of responses, and the highest number of respondents that indicated Drupal is their primary CMS. Drupal is clearly popular with the non-profit crowd and this satisfaction survey provides the Drupal community with focused areas for improvement.

• Quality and reliability: A
• After sales support: B+
• Delivers on promises and deadlines: B+
• Usability: B+
• Value: A

The report is available to members of NTEN for free. It is available to non-members at a discount, $25, with the discount code: "Drupal". A sample format of the report is also available.

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