News from Drupal.org

The Drupal Association has been working to figure out the most effective ways it can help local user groups organize Drupal camps. We quickly realized that there was a lack of data about how past and present Drupal camps were currently being organized. With that in mind, we created an online survey for DrupalCamp organizers that would help everyone understand how Drupal camps currently worked.

Over the course of about 7 weeks, we collected a total of 51 responses, with 6 duplicates and unusable, making our sample size 45 Drupal camps. In a previous article posted on the Drupal Event Organization Drupal group, I posted the results from the first 31 responses. Since that article was published (and because of it), we had an additional 14 responses, making the data that much more valuable.

Overall, the 45 camps that completed the survey had over 6,200 participants, a combined budget of almost $250,000, and were organized by over 400 volunteers.

The resulting data is extremely valuable to both the Drupal Association and Drupal user groups around the world. The Drupal Association now has an idea of how camps are currently being organized and can make informed decisions about how to help future organizers. Local user groups can use this data to help plan future events. In particular, the average cost-per-particpant and participants-per-volunteers data (highlighted below) should be considered when planning future camps.

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Our fifth Drupal 7 alpha version was released a little over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the sixth (and hopefully final) 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, a nearly working upgrade path, and a new default core theme: Bartik!

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 August 1, 2010 (or when the upgrade path is working, whichever comes first) 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 within the next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

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We are proud to announce the keynote speakers at DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010: Rasmus Lerdorf (topic to be crowdsourced), Jeremy Keith (Design of HTML5) and Dries Buytaert (State of Drupal).

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead
Tuesday, August 24th

Dries Buytaert will discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss the final preparations for the release of Drupal 7, the Drupal.org redesign, and the plans for Drupal 8.

Dries Buytaert is passionate about the web, open source, and photography. He is the original creator and project lead of Drupal, an open source social publishing system. He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also working on Mollom, a service that helps you identify content quality and that stops website spam.

Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Project Founder
Wednesday, August 25th

Tell Rasmus which topic you would like him to focus on by leaving a comment on the DrupalCon Copenhagen site.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for creating the PHP project in 1995 and he has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. Rasmus was most recently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! for over 7 years before joining WePay in 2010. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow @rasmus on Twitter.

Jeremy Keith, Author of HTML5 For Web Designers
Thursday, August 26th

Everyone's talking about the benefits of HTML5 for Web applications but the specification also introduces an extra layer of semantic richness to our Web documents. These additions aren't wishful thinking for some far-flung future: you can start using them today. That's because the design principles driving HTML5 are steeped in pragmatism. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it's a website, a content management system, or the very language that underpins the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the Web consultancy firm Clearleft. He wrote the books DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, and most recently, HTML5 For Web Designers. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane.

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On August 23rd, the day before the main conference kicks off, you'll be able to attend training sessions facilitated by leading Drupal experts. These sessions will take place at the main conference venue.

The training sessions will cover:

• Performance and Scalability
• Drupal Powered E-Commerce
• Module development
• Security: process, code and hands-on training

It is possible to attend the training sessions even if you're not going to the main conference. If that's the case, simply buy a ticket for the training session you'd like to attend.

If you buy a ticket for a training session together with a ticket for the conference, we will subtract €30 from the price of your conference ticket (making it €249 + VAT). The discount will be applied automatically during checkout.

Check out the training page for more information on the training sessions.

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ThinkDrop Consulting and the non-profit organization MACILE are collaborating on a pilot program to introduce open-source technology and Drupal to children living in less-advantaged communities, helping them overcome the hurdles that prevent them from openly accessing and sharing information.  In July, we will travel to Itabo, Dominican Republic to teach a two-week class to 6th-12th graders and educators on Internet Technology, Open Source, and Drupal.

In addition to educating both students and teachers on Internet technology and Drupal, we will be documenting the process using OpenAtrium and releasing our curriculum under Creative Commons licensing. Our goal is to create a consistent curriculum to teach kids around the world who may have not ever even used a computer.

Donate Today!

We are seeking $8,000 in funding through Kickstarter, an innovative website that allows users to fund creative endeavors. The funds we are seeking will pay for full-time coding and project development, travel and housing expenses in the Dominican Republic, and additional computers for educators and students. As we will be working in less advantaged communities, maintaining access to consistent electricity and the internet will be a challenge, so a portion of our time will be spent developing a model approach to this problem.

Although we have set our funding goal at $8,000, we hope to exceed it. Any additional funds we receive will be used to continue expanding the Internet Technology programs of COSOLA and MACILE. 

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A couple of days ago, we announced the track chairs and published the final descriptions of the six tracks at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

To make sure that everyone has had a chance to submit a session targeted at a specific track, we have decided to move the session deadline back a week. The revised schedule is as follows:

• The final deadline for session submissions is July 4th.
• Voting will take place from July 5th until July 11th.
• The initial schedule will be published on July 18th.

We have enjoyed seeing all the sessions submitted so far, but it has become apparent that the lack of detailed track descriptions has made it difficult to categorize some sessions. Hopefully, the track descriptions will make it easier for you to target your session at a specific audience.

Please consider the following track descriptions when submitting a session proposal:

• Introducing Drupal
  Chaired by Boris Doesborg
  For users and developers new to Drupal.
• Theming, Design & Usability
  Chaired by Roy Scholten
  For people who focus on usability, user experience, and design.
• Code & Development
  Chaired by Gábor Hojtsy
  For people interested in Drupal's architecture and the future of its codebase.
• Configuration, Set-Up & Performance
  Chaired by Florian Loretan
  For people who want to spend less time coding and more time working on the content of their sites.
• Drupal for Business
  Chaired by Jakub Suchý
  For people who using Drupal as a tool for running their business.
• Providing Professional Drupal Services
  Chaired by Thomas Barregren
  For people who provide Drupal-related professional services.

We can't wait to receive your session proposals!

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You may already have heard of Packt, the fast-growing publisher of hardcopy and digital books on specific technologies, due to the large number of Drupal books it has published over the years. However, you may not be aware that they recently relaunched their website, www.PacktPub.com, using Drupal as its framework.

Packt Publishing is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. Packt has so far published over 15 Drupal books and remains committed to producing practical solution-based books for Drupal developers, along with the best available online bookstore. The new website, which took 12 months from design to launch, was developed with UK-based Bluetel Solutions. The new version not only adds to the existing functionality of Packt’s original website, but now also offers a new, enhanced customer experience with an advanced design.

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We are continuing to work to make DrupalCon Copenhagen as awesome as possible, but we wanted to take some time to give you an update on what we have been working on lately:

As you may have noticed, the deadline for submitting a session has been moved back to June 27th. Voting on the sessions opens on June 28th and closes on July 8th. We will notify all speakers and post the full schedule on July 18th. The votes for the different sessions will be used by the track chairs to inform their decision of which sessions get selected.

If your session isn't selected for one of the main conference tracks, please consider doing it as a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session instead. We will post more information about how to announce your BOF sessions as we get closer to the conference.

If you are not attending one of the training sessions on August 23rd, we would love to see you at the Unconference. This will be a perfect opportunity to connect with the local open source community and to discuss issues outside of the Drupal-sphere. The Unconference will be run BarCamp-style and it will be free to attend, but please register in advance to help us determine how much coffee we need to brew.

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PitBulls.org is a community and information site centered around the American Pit Bull Terrier, usually referred to as Pit Bulls.

Pit Bulls get a lot of coverage in the media, usually negative, because there is rampant fear of the breed. They are also often the target of Breed Specific Legislation (BSL). PitBulls.org aims to share another perspective, those of passionate Pit Bull owners. The main mission of the site is to convey that Pit Bulls make great family pets, to get the word out that a dog is only a reflection how it is treated and raised, and to provide a central hub where owners can connect and share their pictures and stories.

The site was conceived and developed by PropDrop Web Development and Marketing. PropDrop not only does client work, but also performs web niche analysis and develops in-house web properties based on that research in order to gain market share in a wide variety of areas. PitBulls.org is one of these properties. It also doesn't hurt that we are dog lovers and own a Pit Bull/Lab mix named Bauer, so we are our own audience in some sense.

PropDrop uses Drupal exclusively for its in-house projects, because we can create a community and information site with some advanced features in under 2 weeks, with everything optimized for search with little effort. It also gives us the opportunity to expand a site's feature set in the future without interfering with current functionality, taking a site in directions that might not be possible with other content management systems.

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On June 12, 2010, the Los Angeles Drupal user group is hosting Git with Drupal 7, a one-day event featuring both a Git bootcamp followed by a Drupal 7 code sprint. To make this event as accessible as possible, we're broadcasting the Git bootcamp via WebEx conference from 10am-1pm PDT. Please join us!

Drupal.org is moving from using the CVS version control system to Git for the development of Drupal 8. As Drupal core development is migrated to Git, thousands of developers will need to learn Git in order to help develop Drupal 8 as well as their own contributed modules for Drupal 7 when the contrib repository is moved to Git later this year.

The importance of moving to a modern version control system was outlined last year in step 5 of Dries' 8 Steps to Drupal 8. Git was selected after a lengthy evaluation discussion, and Drupal.org's migration to Git was the subject of The Exodus: Leading Drupal out of CVS, a session at DrupalCon San Francisco earlier this year. That session was well-attended and featured members of the Drupal.org Git Migration Team, including Damien Tournoud (DamZ), Derek Wright (dww), Angie Byron (webchick) and Sam Boyer (sdboyer).

During both the bootcamp and code sprint, we'll be gathered in the #drupal-la IRC channel and all are welcome to join us. We also recorded the git bootcamp and posted the video online on blip.tv and on iTunes.

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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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Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 6 is available now!

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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Open Source has seen a lot of adoption from the US government in the last year. David Cole, from the New Media Team at the White House, will introduce the DrupalCon Keynote by talking about the decision to move Whitehouse.gov to Drupal and their future plans to use Drupal and open source to foster citizen engagement. Other panelists will discuss their experiences working with Drupal and open source in government.

What questions do you have for this panel? http://goo.gl/mod/cZPS

Open Source in Government: A Panel Discussion
Panel:
David H. Cole, Executive Office of the President
Andrew Hoppin, CIO NY State Senate

Moderator: Michael Walsh, Forum One Communications

Open Source in Government: A Panel Discussion
Live broadcast time: 13:30 - 14:45 (GMT -7) Wednesday, 21 Apr 2010
Submit questions or vote: http://goo.gl/mod/cZPS
Live Video Stream: http://www.drupal.org.uk/news/drupalvolcon-uk-2010

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