Drupal.org

Act now if you want to get your DrupalCon Copenhagen ticket at the current price of €249. On June 28th at 8am CEST the ticket price will go up to €279.

Go to the conference site to buy your ticket for the conference, which will be held August 23-27.

Your ticket includes:

• 90 sessions spread out over 3 days
• Ad hoc BOF (birds of a feather) sessions
• Access to pre- and post-conference code and documentation sprints
• Access to the coder lounge where you can hang out and code when you're not attending sessions
• Access to fooBar, the official bar of DrupalCon Copenhagen
• …and, last but not least, a chance to meet your fellow Drupalers

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Drupal 6.17, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system, is now available for download. There are no security fixes in this release. Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is recommended. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

Highlights of changes in this release include improvements of session cookie handling, better processing of big XML-RPC payloads, improved PostgreSQL compatibility, better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility, improved Japanese support in search module, better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation and improved logging for login failures. An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved. In total there were about 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6.

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The Dutch language website FondswervingOnline.nl (or "Fundraising Online") is the largest online fundraising and subsidies database in the Netherlands. The website offers businesses and NGO’s access to a community with the latest public data on subsidies, sponsorship opportunities, government funding, private investors, prizes, microcredits and more.

The initial goal of the project was to build the best possible website in its niche. We looked at Efactor.com (an entrepreneur community) for inspiration and we asked ourselves if it were possible build a similar community with Drupal. We believe it can! Our registered users have access to a mini-Facebook profile with status and activity updates. Based on the user preferences, members with identical interests are matched and can find each other, for example to cooperate in a joint fundraising application. Community pages and a forum are available to share user interests.

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

This release includes many critical bug fixes, especially around the upgrade path, security issues, JavaScript, performance, and other areas.

Please see the release notes for more details.

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. On or about June 21, 2010 we will create a new official Drupal 7 release. If this list is fixed, it will be a beta release. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

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Dahon, headquartered in Los Angeles, California, is a globally renowned folding bike manufacturer. The company has offices in the US, Taiwan, and China, and sells its unique range of folding bicycles and accessories in over 30 countries worldwide. Dahon recently relaunched its online presence with a beautiful new website developed by Philadelphia based Drupal shop, Zivtech. The following is a run-down of how Zivtech developed the site to meet Dahon's usability and functionality requirements.

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You can now submit your session proposals for DrupalCon Copenhagen, which will be held August 23-27. The conference will feature the following tracks:

• Introducing Drupal
• Theming, Design & Usability
• Code & Development
• Configuration, Set-Up & Performance
• Drupal for Business
• Providing Professional Drupal Services

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WikiJob is the UK's largest graduate jobs website. Founded in 2007 on an untidy mixture of vBulletin and Mediawiki, it ported over to Drupal in 2008.

Since moving to Drupal, the site has grown exponentially. WikiJob now receives 250k monthly unique visitors and delivers over 1.5 million monthly page views. For the two founders (Chris (myself) & Ed), this has meant a quick rise as a business, from working in our bedrooms to offices in Central London. WikiJob is currently a team of five, and is likely to grow to be a team of ten by the end of 2010. In months April - Dec 2009, we billed £102,000 in advertising. This year, we hope to bill over £500,000.

Drupal has been a key ingredient to our success. The unique power of Drupal is that it allows one person to single-handedly accomplish the work of a team of web developers, with very little code. Anyone with the time can make an awesome web site.

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Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 5 is available now!

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

This release includes many critical bug fixes and other improvements, including:

• Color module now usable by themes other than Garland.
• Usability improvements including re-weightable roles and saner Forum module defaults.
• A variety of optimizations made to data import-related functions to make migrations faster.
• Lots of previously missing documentation for hooks has now been documented. Hooray!
• Increased test coverage, particularly core Tokens.
• Lots of smaller bug fixes, security patches, and improvements.

Please see the release notes for more details.

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. Our next release will be on or about May 21, 2010. If the upgrade path is working, and all known security issues are fixed, this will be a beta. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

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Drupal is excited to announce that we have 18 amazing projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. This is the sixth year that Drupal has participated in the program, bringing the total investment made by Google in Drupal through the SoC to over $450,000. This investment has resulted in numerous modules and core improvements, but more importantly it has brought in many long time contributors to the drupal project and helped keep numerous other contributors engaged and active in the community.

This year's Summer of Code projects focus on integrating Drupal with other APIs, improving and updating popular contributed modules, improving security, and helping to build new functionalities that will help keep Drupal at the cutting edge. Some of the projects still require co-mentors, and we'll be trying to connect these students with the community in a real world setting, so if you're interested in helping out with community bonding or code review, or even if you just want to keep tabs on the SoC progress, join us over at the Summer of Code group - it's not too late for you to help out!

Please help us in thanking Google for their support of Drupal and all Free & Open Source Software projects, and please welcome our Summer of Code 2010 Students.

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The DrupalCon European organizing group and the Danish Drupal Community is pleased to invite everyone to register for DrupalCon Copenhagen, which will be held at the world-famous Bella Center August 23rd to 27th, 2010.

For the next three days (through April 21st), you can take advantage of the special DrupalCon to DrupalCon price for 249€ including lunches and snacks! Register now to guarantee your place at the premier event of the Drupal community. DrupalCon Copenhagen will feature three full days of sessions from the best and brightest in the Drupal community. The session days will be bookended by code sprints and professional Drupal training sessions.

Copenhagen is a world-class city full of wonderful cuisine and culture. We have arranged for special pricing at hotels and hostels and of course there will be plenty of parties!

The price for early-bird tickets will go up to 279€ on Thursday, April 22nd. All tickets are subject to Danish VAT.

Thanks to Brightcove and the DrupalCon San Franciso Organizing Committee, Dries Buytaert's State of Drupal keynote will be streamed live from the main stage of DrupalCon San Francisco beginning at 1:30 PM PDT (GMT -7) on Monday. Please join us at http://sf2010.drupal.org/keynote/live to watch Dries share his assessment of where we are and vision of where we are going. The keynotes from Tim O'Reilly on Tuesday, and Dave Cole from the White House on Wednesday will also be streamed.

Sparkeo is a new video course creation platform that launched its private beta at Le Web 09 (one of the world's largest Web conferences, that takes place each year in Paris) and generated buzz when it was recently featured on Techcrunch and other blogs.

Sparkeo is a video platform for knowledge entrepreneurs that enables them to create a business by creating, promoting and selling video courses leveraging their expertise. Sparkeo provides a complete toolset for the monetization and creation of interactive courses.

Sparkeo is not a destination Web site but a platform where users can create their courses and take them anywhere over the Web as a stand-alone video player. This will allow the content creators to be where their paying audience and students might be, such as blogs, Web sites or any social network. One of the most important features of this solution is the inclusion of a portable payment solution which enables the user to purchase directly from the player itself, anywhere it’s embedded.

One of the interesting things about the product that we created for Sparkeo is that through its evolution as a project we identified it as a perfect example of the benefits of building a platform under Drupal because it covers almost all of the sales pitches that we (at Linnovate) use with our potential customers.

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One of the more intricate websites recently completed by ISL Consulting is the grant submission site, Entelligence built for Jobson Healthcare Information (JHI) in New York. The premise of the site is familiar to many, especially in the non-profit world: users register on the site and submit an initial proposal (this site accepts grant proposals from young scientists for research in cardiopulmonary medicine).

There are strict deadlines for submission. These are evaluated in detail by a Steering Committee (SC). Deliberations are managed by a Chairman, who assigns reviewers and collates the rankings and comments from SC members online. These are confidential until a final, simultaneous online/offline voting meeting that determines the winners. As the function of the site shifts, the administrative interface changes.

The website’s behavior also shifts substantially for applicants and judges depending on the grant submission stage.

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Florida DrupalCamp 2010 held just outside of Orlando was the largest Drupal-related gathering the Sunshine state has ever seen. The February 20-21 event pulled in more than 175 attendees from Florida and the US, more than $5,000 in sponsorships, and generated a lot of interest in regional community building throughout Florida. Anecdotal input and a formal survey indicate the weekend was an unqualified success. In the spirit of open-source, this case study provides other DrupalCamp organizers insight into planning and organizing a worthwhile DrupalCamp, from early planning through follow-up participant surveys.

FDC10 was the culmination of a strong effort by the Florida Drupal User's Group, local companies, and generous sponsors. It was unique in many ways, including the number and diversity of the participants as well as how the event was organized. The weekend was less of a "barcamp" style event and more of a mini-DrupalCon, with almost all sessions pre-determined, and several generous sponsorships covering plenty of food and swag for all attendees who paid a minimal registration fee of $5.

The weekend featured a full day of sessions divided into three tracks based on experience level, including one dedicated to beginners to introduce users to the Drupal platform and sow the seeds for growing the community. The second day was Coding for A Cause, a coding sprint among 40 volunteer developers of all skill levels that built operational sites for two deserving, PR-savvy, Florida not-for profit organizations.

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BookTeller.com is a subscription-based online library for animated and narrated children's books, available in both English and Chinese. Currently, there are over 200 books available for subscribers and more are being added. Its goals are to help parents and educators teach children how to read and to get them reading more often by giving them books that are both engaging and fun.

Besides being an online library, it is also a platform for authors and publishers who wish to transform their work into animated books and to monetize them. For that, we have a revenue sharing program and a team of award-winning animators to help out with the animation.

The consumer-facing website is used for, among other things, showcasing what books are in the library and to handle registrations/payments. The books are accessed via a client reader based on Adobe's AIR platform, which must be downloaded and installed.

The following is our experience in building out the website using Drupal. I hope it is useful as another example of what's possible.

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Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x, by George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, is a new title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at business owners and ordinary Drupal users without development expertise who want to create, administer and design their own online shop. This is the first title that deals with Ubercart 2.x, providing non-technical users with information about how to sell shippable goods, downloadable products, recurring memberships, and event tickets, as well as enable other complex interactions using various contributed Drupal modules. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% or 20% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

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2010 is here and its time for another Summer of Code, courtesy of Google! For those who don't know, Summer of Code is an amazing program in which student developers are paid a stipend by Google in exchange for working on open source projects along with mentors from those projects. Drupal has benefited enormously from Summer of Code over the years. Many of our most productive and well-known members are former Summer of Code students, including Drupal 7 core maintainer Angela Byron (webchick), Drupal 6 core maintainer Gábor Hojtsy and many many more. For more information see the Summer of Code FAQ.

2010 marks Drupal's sixth year being accepted as a mentoring organization. Last year we successfully completed 21 student projects and it would be great to match or even surpass that this year, but there are two things we need to make that happen - Students and Mentors!

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On Saturday, April 17th, the weekend before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers. Meeting in person for a full day and having more focused time to brainstorm about just core, should be really valuable. We can come up with plans to get Drupal 7 released, and we can get initial alignment on Drupal 8.

To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In addition to the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions and breakout sessions in smaller groups. The lightning talks will take the format: "How to make X more awesome?" where X can be anything in Drupal core. The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration. The original plan was to have 16 lightning talks, but based on feedback, I'm now leaning towards more breakout sessions and fewer lightning talks. On Sunday, the day after the Drupal core developer summit, there will be a code lounge where longer breakout sessions can be held too. Suggestions welcome as we can still made adjustments. Read on to learn more about how to attend.

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Automated testing has greatly improved the Drupal core development process. With automated testing over 24,500 unique core patches have been reviewed, and almost 19,000 test assertions are now run against every core patch. The result has been faster development cycle, more stable releases, and the ability to add features more quickly to Drupal core.

The benefits of automated testing are now available for contributed module developers and Drupal site owners through the addition of new functionality to the qa.drupal.org and the automated testing framework (PIFR) that integrates with Drupal core.

The leaders of the Drupal quality assurance project are holding a webinar and sprint to help contributed module developers and Drupal site owners benefit from this automated testing.

• Webinar: April 1st, 1PM EST (Webinar registration)
• Sprint: Sunday, April 18th, Drupalcon San Francisco, 9AM, Coder Lounge

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DrupalCon 2010 is in sight! In less than 30 days over 2,000 Drupal fans will descend upon the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

The final schedule has been posted, so get ready to plan your DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 experience. Sign-in, and then sign-up for your favorite sessions! http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule

This year, the hottest sessions at DrupalCon will cover topics such as: Whitehouse.gov's use of Drupal, Facebook applications, Twitter integration, iPhone apps and Web services, cloud computing, e-commerce, the latest trends in Web design, how to get started with Drupal, and much, much more. All sessions fall into one of six tracks including First Impressions, Design & Usability, Code-Free Success, Technical Details, Leveraging Drupal for Business, and Providing Professional Drupal Services.

Registration for DrupalCon San Francisco is only $195 through March 25. After that, it goes up to $225. All attendees will be able to participate in three full days of sessions and seminars led by the best and brightest minds in the Drupal community.

Register at https://sf2010.drupal.org/registration

We would like to extend a huge thank you to the DrupalCon 2010 sponsors. This event wouldn't be as amazing without their support.

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