While many people say that theming is one of the better organized topics in Drupal's documentation, many have expressed frustration that relevant pages are located in a variety of different branches, and even separate handbooks. The documentation team has also decided that this has created an unsustainable path for forward maintenance. Therefore, as a first step, we are going to merge nearly all theming-related information into a single Consolidated Theming Guide on Sunday, 23 November, to be located at http://drupal.org/theme-guide (currently pointing to the Drupal 6 Theme Guide). Existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible.

A theming documentation workgroup is now forming to focus on reorganizing the new book's navigation hierarchy. For further information on the project and how to join in, please visit the group's project page.

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Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.

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Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.

Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.

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CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to provide stronger code and APIs. We've tried to respond to many of the things that were often requested but were difficult or impossible to do in the Drupal 5 version: streamline the process of creating fields, use drag-n-drop to reorganize fields and values, provide a user-friendly 'Add more' button for multiple values, give developers an API and more tools to customize CCK behavior, and provide more documentation.

Many of the things you see in the latest code would not have been possible without all the new Drupal 6 and Views 2 features. Drupal 6, CCK 2 and Views 2 make a great combination!

CCK Links

• Project page
• CCK 6.x-2.0 release notes (people upgrading from previous RCs should read this).
• Download CCK 6.x-2.0 - Fresh from the maintainers: 6.x-2.1 bugfix release

Important: This release fixes a (minor) security issue that was present in the previous RC releases.
See the Security Annoucement for more informations.

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A year after answering Dries Buytaert's call for Drupal book authors, Aaron Winborn is pleased to announce the publication of Drupal Multimedia, which is now available! Packt Publishing, known for their support of Open Source projects, will donate a portion of the book's royalties to the Drupal Association.

The book teaches the best practices and contributed modules for integrating Images, Video, and Audio into your site. Written for Drupal 6, the book assumes you are a developer, themer, or administrator who needs to embed multimedia. It makes heavy use of Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2, and offers demonstrations of the various modules required for the task.

The book helps to answer common questions, such as when to use Image or ImageField, how to leverage the power of FileField, and how to override theme functions to display multimedia content the way we need it.

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The Drupal Association today announced that Drupal has won two prestigious Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards this week - the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS. This marks the second consecutive year that Drupal has won Packt Publishing’s Overall Open Source CMS award. In addition, on Monday, Packt Publishing recognized leading Drupal contributor Earl Miles as a 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued Person (MVP).

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For the third year in a row, Drupal has been nominated for a Packt Publishing Open Source CMS award. Packt Publishing is announcing winners all week. Today they announced the 2008 best PHP open source CMS.

The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.

Drupal won this award in both the popular vote and the judges selection. The judges cited improvements to installation, updates, breadth of features in modules, and how Drupal handles errors in these processes. Of special note was Drupal's use of social features and how those features integrate with web content management. Of course the final advantage Drupal had was the "large and hugely supportive community". This award belongs to everyone in the Drupal community for helping each other and particularly new users.

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This morning Earl Miles, also known as merlinofchaos, was named one of the 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People. Earl won specifically for his contributions to the Drupal project.

What is particularly exciting about this award is that Earl is the third Drupal community member to win an award for their contributions to the Drupal project this year. Bryan Ruby said it best.

What I found interesting is that most of the MVPs for projects were the projects' lead/founder. Perhaps that says something about Drupal truly being community driven.

Please congratulate Earl on a well deserved award for his contributions and leadership to the Drupal project. You can read Earl's response on his blog Angry Donuts.

Drupal 6.6 and Drupal 5.12, 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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Registration for DrupalCon DC is now open and the DrupalCon DC website live. In the two hours after the first announcement went out via Twitter, 200 people registered to come to DrupalCon! Discount tickets are still available at $175 a ticket - about 200 are left now so move quickly to make sure you get the lowest rate available. Also, there are already 18 sessions submitted and voting has begun - create a profile to vote on sessions and submit your own.

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Three and a half months ago, Views, along with CCK and OG were made available as a release candidates. Today, I've finally come to the conclusion that the remaining bugs are minor enough to go ahead with an official, formal release of Views 2, and we can finally say that this module is now out and available. Yes, it actually beat Panels 2 to final release!

If you've never tried Views 2, or are hesitating about Drupal 6, this new release of Views is a very good reason to consider making the transition, especially in your new sites.

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views 2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

Possibly the most important change is that Views can now create lists of anything: nodes, users, taxonomy -- you name it! Another large change you'll notice right off the bat is that the UI for Views has completely changed, and is full of JavaScripty goodness. While it may take some getting used to initially, we're confident that you'll find that the changes ultimately make creating views much easier than before.

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As of today, October 16 2008, everyone with a user account on Drupal.org is able to edit most handbook pages (details are noted below). All users can already create new pages in the handbooks so this expands on that to allow editing of pages other than those you created. In the past this has been permitted only for members of the documentation team or site maintainers.

This new permission is currently set to last for a trial period of one month. At the end of the period, on November 15 2008, the documentation team and site maintainers will assess if the trial has been successful and make a decision whether to continue to allow open editing. If the change causes too much spam or vandalism in the handbook, then we will be forced to revoke open editing. If we are unsure, we may decide to extend the trial period in one month increments until we can firmly make a decision one way or the other.

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The Manning Publications Company recently announced two new books about Drupal. Manning is a well known publisher of many high quality technical books and the popular "in Action" series. Their decision to release two books about Drupal highlights the growth of interest in the Drupal platform. Manning's decision to work with established members of the Drupal community and also donate a portion of sales to the Drupal Association shows their desire to be a responsible member of the Drupal world.

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For the past few years the Drupal Documentation Team has been led by Steven Peck (sepeck). Steven was the second person to take on this role (Charlie Lowe was the first), and he has done a great job. Not only has he grown the documentation team to include a lot of talented and hard-working volunteer writers, he has overseen the restructuring and reorganization of Drupal.org's documentation handbooks, greatly improving their structure and accessibility. Thank you Steven for the great work!

Like so many Drupal contributors, Steven works on Drupal completely as a volunteer. His day job has been demanding a lot of time lately, and he has decided to step down from being the Documentation Team Leader. That means it is time to pass the torch to the next person who can then sprint with it for a while.

One great thing about the Drupal community is seeing people grow into new roles and take more responsibility upon themselves. This is certainly the case for Addison Berry (add1sun), who in her two years working with Drupal has become involved with virtually every aspect of the Drupal project. Lately Addi has been more and more active with the documentation team, making her a clear choice in my mind to carry on where Steven left off. I'm therefore very happy to announce that Addison Berry, aka add1sun, is the new documentation team leader, effective immediately.

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Drupal 6.5 and Drupal 5.11, 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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Packt has today announced details of Matt Butcher’s new Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery book, which is scheduled for release in December. The book is being released as Packt’s first RAW (Read as we Write) book, which are designed as the most immediate and cutting-edge way to buy a Packt book. Generally available 4-6 months before the book is published, buying a RAW book gives you the opportunity to gain immediate access to content and share in the editorial process of producing a book.

A RAW version of a Packt book is just that; an unedited and unpolished version of the final product. As soon as the author has written a new chapter, Packt will add it to the eBook and notify customers who can download it immediately.

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On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

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LEADEL.NET is a video portal and social network, funded by the European Jewish Congress, which revolves around the elements that make social, technological, political and financial leaders tick and thereby encouraging Leadel's viewers to explore what makes them do what they do.The site focuses on Jewish identity and tries to explore the differences which make us as identity bearing human beings unique.
The path LEADEL have taken in inspiring the perseverance of that identity, is to create a website which will appeal to young people and will adhere to their standards of quality, user experience and ease of use.

This was a great chance to take the services module further then we (at linnovate) have ever done before.
We ended up writing 16 custom services and using drupal to organize the site's information and flash as a front end, this combination seems to be the best of both worlds.

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About Student Activities at Texas A&M University

The Department of Student Activities at Texas A&M University is responsible for overseeing the annual recognition process of the 850+ student organizations on the College Station, TX campus. The department also advises several large organizations directly and offers leadership and involvement opportunities to the entire student body. Many of the most popular traditions on campus are heavily supported by the department, including Fish Camp (an extended orientation program attended by over 5,000 freshmen a year) and The Big Event (a one-day service project in which 10,000 students complete over 1,000 community service tasks in the city and surrounding areas).

History of Student Organization Web Hosting

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After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

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The Knight Drupal Initiative which funds new and existing Drupal projects. The next monthly review meeting takes place on Thursday, 2 October 2008 at 15:00 EDT (19:00 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 an hour and a half to review current proposals, discuss the application process and introduce new proposals to the community.

Community members are encouraged to review and comment on the existing proposals before the meeting.

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A new top-level handbook will be added to Drupal.org this weekend, September 27-28, titled "Getting Involved." It will appear on the main Documentation landing page. We first posted about the new book back in August and have been working hard to get everything in to place to take it live.

For the creation of the new handbook, the "Developing for Drupal" and "About" handbooks will have some sections moved into the new book. The work will be happening this weekend, so those handbooks may be in a bit of disarray during the process. We are mostly moving existing pages or creating new ones so that no URLs will be harmed. Some pages may be rewritten to reduce duplication, but we are striving to not remove any pages.

What is it?

The driving idea behind the handbook is to not only tell people how to contribute to Drupal, but also to explain why, and encourage folks to explore contributing as a great way to actually learn and make their own Drupal lives better. The new handbook will cover everything from how to get an account on Drupal.org to how to use CVS.

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Davis Applied Technology College

The Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), located in Kaysville, Utah, offers open-entry/open-exit, competency based programs on a year-round schedule. Our programs are broken up into the following schools: Business & Information, Construction & Apprenticeship, Health Professions, Manufacturing, Service Professions, and Transportation. For 30 years the DATC has been offering opportunities to individuals with difficult schedules or tight finances to further their education. Which is why our motto is "we change lives."

Web Team

With a medium-sized College we definitely had a lot of people willing to give feedback regarding the new web site. With that in mind we decided to put together a team of about 10 faculty and staff members that met regularly to discuss the progress and plan for the site. This team made the preparations for the site a lot smoother because we were able to look at it from all angles. It helped us feel more comfortable about the decisions that we were making along the way. In the end it definitely made the outcome more welcome.

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MothersClick.com and the entire ParentsClick Network is very proud to announce that we've been acquired by Lifetime Entertainment. This marks a major milestone for a digital company whose online technology stack is largely built on Drupal.

The transaction is further proof that Drupal is competing with the likes of Ruby on Rails as a framework for high-tech startups. Lifetime's strategic acquisition of ParentsClick Network shows its belief that Drupal can power some of the largest online social community sites. Lifetime's VP of technology Nathan Potter states, "With the acquisition of ParentsClick, we continue to grow our core competency in Drupal development. With one of the largest and fastest growing Drupal-based communities anywhere, we will continue to show the world what Drupal is capable of."

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