Conscious Manifestations

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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Vocalo.org is a bold new concept in community media: a complex social media website and an associated broadcast radio station in Chicago, IL.

Vocalo.org is a place for people to compose and share stories -- including images, audio, and video -- with their fellow users. User-generated content is broadcast on the radio station as well as made available on the website for licensed remixing. Vocalo users span the globe, while the broadcast radio station (89.5 FM) and local focus keep the project true to its roots.

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The Knight Drupal Initiative is an ongoing grant program for Drupal development. To make the program successful, community review of proposals is essential.

We will meet for the next round of proposal reviews on Thursday, August 7th at 15:00 Eastern (US) (19:00 UTC). This meeting is part of our ongoing monthly review meetings. To be held in #drupal-dojo on IRC [freenode]. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information.)

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Every year, I try to communicate the "Drupal Zeitgeist" in at least one of my "State of Drupal" presentations. To help me capture the State of Drupal for my presentation at DrupalCon Szeged next month, I'd like to invite you all to take part in the State of Drupal 2008 survey that I created. The goal of the survey is to better understand our needs and to help prioritize our efforts. If you can't attend DrupalCon Szeged, don't worry; I'll share all results after the conference.

Now, fill out the survey and help shape the future of Drupal!

Angela Byron was announced as best contributor at the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame awards July 22nd, 2008. Please comment below if you've received help or have helped webchick help others as a way of demonstrating your congratulations.

Just a few years ago Angela Byron made the fateful decision to wander into #drupal and ask a question. Several years later, her helpful personality has tamed the #drupal developers and made the Drupal community more understanding and compassionate to its users and new developers.

Angela joined the Drupal project in 2005 as a Google Summer of Code student. If there is a way to contribute to Drupal, she does it:

She goes to various conferences and recruits people to join the Drupal community. Especially women. See
Speaking at Women in Open Source event in Los Angeles and women in open source on linux for slides examples and Google Podcast: Women in Open Source.

Angie wrote the form API reference just to mention one of her bigger achievements. She is one of the best recruiters for the Drupal documentation team.

Angie is the acting secretary of the Drupal Association, the non-profit organization responsible for overseeing the success of the Drupal project through raising funds, maintaining infrastructure, and running Drupal events.

She now leads the Drupal project in Google Highly Open Participation and Summer of Code events.

Her first patch was a huge one, revamping all our help texts. Subsequent code contributions to Drupal have included numerous extension modules, a theme, and significant core patches for Drupal 5, 6 and 7.

Angie is among the most active patch reviewers, meaning she interacts in a constructive way with most of the other people contributing to Drupal.

As a part of her day job at Lullabot, she flys around the world delivering training to groups of people learning how to be Drupal developers and themers.

Angie is a role model for everyone and an inspiration to work with. Her dedication to quality is contagious, and her passion for inclusion sets the standard for how people should work with each other.

- Robert Douglass, Senior Drupal Advisor, Acquia.

Angie has been a joy to work with, and I appreciate her dedication to the Drupal project. She makes Drupal shine.

-Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, Drupal Association, Acquia

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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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