News from Drupal.org

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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