Mid-terms for Google Summer of Code 2008 are upon us. We have 19 students and over 40 mentors working tirelessly to bring you fantastic code ranging from new design tools, to fantastic new APIs, to improvements to existing modules such as Views and NodeQueue. Read on to meet the students behind SoC, and actually test out preliminary alpha versions of their projects yourselves! Make sure to log feedback to the projects' issue queues. :)

For more information about Summer of Code, see the SoC 2008 group on groups.drupal.org.

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The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is one of the world's premier art museums, best-known for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. In addition to housing famous paintings such as Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles and Grant Wood's American Gothic, the Museum also has world-class collections of photography, arms and armor, ceramic figures, portrait sculptures, miniatures, and galleries of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, including the mummy of Paankhenamun.

Palantir.net has worked with AIC since 2005, when we helped them develop and implement their site redesign and CMS integration. Their existing site only showed a small selection of material from their collection; the goal of this project was to integrate the site with their backend asset management system to allow users to browse the Museum's entire collection online, as well as allow the Museum to quickly and easily create micro-sites to promote exhibitions.

Palantir worked on the AIC Collections site in collaboration with design partner Studio Blue, who provided the original design direction for the AIC Web site. Larry Garfield (Crell) and Colleen Carroll were the joint architects of the site, with Larry working as lead programmer and Colleen as lead themer. Tiffany Farriss provided strategic leadership for the project.

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Earlier this week we have closed our special 80 Euro early bird offer with 335 registered participants! A great big thank you to all the people that already signed up!

With 8 more weeks to go we thought it was a good time to do some preliminary evaluation about our progress. We took the sign-up data from the past four Drupalcons and compared that with what we have so far. As was to be expected there has been some "nice action" in the last week of the first early bird offer. (Note that the registration was twice as long in Barcelona, so the numbers shown here are the sums from week 1 and 2; 3 and 4; 5 and 6).

In our third week we had 185 new sign ups of which over a hundred happened on the last day of the early bird offer. We didn't achieve Sunnyvale's peak signups of week two (212 signups), but our total of 335 registered participants did set a new record for the total amount of participants registered after three weeks of registration!

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We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC). Many months of work have gone into extensive rewrites of these modules, leading to major improvements that will make Drupal 6 an even more attractive platform for building websites.

As always, you should upgrade these modules on a test site first, and make sure to make a complete backup. You never know how your site's customizations will affect things, or what silly little thing nobody else caught.

IMPORTANT! There are a couple Drupal core bugs that could affect anyone using Views and anyone updating from an earlier version of CCK. They will be fixed in the Drupal 6.3 release, whenever it gets issued. Until then, you must use http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.x-dev.tar.gz the latest development release of core.

More details about these pivotal module releases follow...

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Understanding Drupal is the first video in The Lullabot Learning Series. This video provides an overview of Drupal as a content management system, as a PHP web application framework, and as a developer community. Its documentary-style exploration covers all the terminology and fundamental concepts for both site administrators and developers. If you've ever been confused by Drupal or are still trying to wrap your head around the community and platform, this video is intended as a roadmap to accelerate your journey up the Drupal learning curve.

Lullabots Addison Berry (add1sun), Angela Byron (webchick), Jeff Eaton (eaton), Nathan Haug (quicksketch), Jeff Robbins (jjeff), James Walker (walkah), and Matt Westgate (matt westgate) sit down to tell us about Drupal in this video directed and edited by Kent Bye (kentbye). A portion of the profits from this video will be donated directly to the Drupal Association.

Topics include...

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The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students in the Research Methods class, taught by professor Kathryn Summers, have completed a usability study on Drupal. The Drupal community has been working with Becca Scollan in the usability group.

The usability research used video recordings and eye tracking tools to follow participants gaze in the Drupal interface. The study used eight participants, which is considered a valid sample. The study duplicated some tests done in usability testing at the University of Minnesota, and confirmed several results.

Fixing the usability problems

Core issues from both studies

• WYSIWYG in core: WYSIWYG group, Better input format support in Drupal 7
• Evaluators said that "content" was used too often in too many contexts and that was confusing: content, post, node , Change "story" content type to "article" or "news", Content types descriptions tweaks

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For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal's licensing status. Is it GPL version 2? Are we moving to GPL version 3? Could we even if we wanted to? Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]? As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.

Understanding licensing, and the differences between licenses, is more important than some realize. Open source is not the same as public domain. Open source and Free Software requires that source code be made available and that others are allowed to make use and share of the source code, but there are rules attached to how they can do so just as there is with proprietary software. For example, not all open source software can be combined, and there are requirements for how you distribute the source code of a program. Knowing which of those rules apply to Drupal, and to Drupal modules and themes, is important not only for the health of the code base (so we know what we can and can't do with the work of over a thousand people) but also to the health of the growing commercial Drupal economy.

I am pleased to announce that we now do have firm answers to these questions, and have a new and shiny FAQ up to answer them. There is nothing new in the FAQ; it is just a clarification of some edge cases that didn't used to exist.

We'd like to thank James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center for his help in working out the details. We also wanted to take a few moments to go into some of the reasoning behind how we reached a few of these conclusions.

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UPDATE: Google search is now offered when Drupal search block is disabled. Details. We are also working on installing Xapian, and other open source search engines locally on the Drupal.org infrastructure.

When the site gets too busy, the infrastructure team sometimes disables the built-in search function. When this happens, you can use Google to search by putting site:drupal.org in with your query. There are also a couple of unofficial sites mentioned in the comments below. The issue to discuss how best to handle providing an alternate search is here. Comments have been disabled on this post because they were becoming unproductive. If you are able to help with the problem, please do so via that issue. Please note that saying "someone" needs to do "something" will not be any more helpful on that issue. We are already well aware of that.

Michelle

This Wednesday we opened the registration for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 and some of the early birds are already in! If you sign up before the end of June you will be able to buy your ticket at the extra discounted price of 80 EUR. From July the price will increase to 120 EUR, from August on to 160 EUR and just before and during the conference it will be 200 EUR to attend. We also help you get a hotel room and buy shuttle bus tickets until July 24, so if you'd like to go the easy way, make sure to register by then.

A week ago we published the sponsor packages. We received positive feedback from several companies and we already sold our first platinum package! As you might have noticed we only have 3 gold and 4 platinum packages available this Drupalcon. So if you want to get the exclusive benefits of these packages and get your company's name on one of our BoF or session rooms, contact us as soon as possible. To make the conference a huge success again, we will need your help: if you know a company that could be interested in sponsoring Drupalcon please get in touch!

We also opened session submission last week. If you have a topic that you would like to present this Drupalcon please fill in the form. Our track chairs will then evaluate your proposal and choose the sessions that will become part of the conference tracks. Session submission will be open until the last week of July. You can also submit BoF session proposals for our unconference program. This Drupalcon we are going to have 3 bigger rooms for larger BoFs (and an open space for smaller ones), so make sure to get the word out about your plans and spark interest in them sooner then later.

Drupalcon North America 2009, Drupalcon Europe 2009 as well as Drupalcon [place your idea here] are being planned right now. If you would like to have a Drupalcon in your town please let us know by submitting a formal proposal. If you have questions regarding the submission process feel free to contact the Drupal Association and someone will help you.

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Last week, I released thevintageaviator.co.nz. It was probably one of the most challenging Drupal sites I've ever done, but also the best so far. It's a presentation of a local WW1 Warplane workshop, containing build stories, reference material, and thousands of great images of plane reproductions and archive materials.

The build story is a long one, mostly because the requirements shifted along the way quite a bit. This story is targeted at current Drupal site developers who are interested in the tools and techniques used. Mostly to head off the "so how did you do that?" questions we get whenever we do a write-up :-)

However among the interesting thing for developers and designers will be the complex layered look, the way this layout was optimized to scale to all screen sizes, and the surgery I did to Drupal to make this all happen.

Initial feedback we've received so far has been overwhelmingly positive (save some justified grumbles about the page weight) and I'd like to share this case study.

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SourceForge.Net is a site which strongly believes in Open Source and what it stands for, in much the same way as the Drupal Community. Every year they host a competition where their community votes for their favourite packages and this year is no different. After reading through the Program Information I cannot see any reason why we shouldn't try to get Drupal up there ("Any open source project of any kind can be nominated by anyone (yes, that means you!) to be a finalist in any category" - from their website).

On their site they say "This is for the prize" in regard to voting, however I'm not completely sure if the prize is simply winning or if there is some financial gain for the Drupal Association.

So, lets try to get Drupal nominated for an award on Sourceforge.Net...
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-nominate

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In preparation for a web seminar with Drupal local group organizers in the North and South American time zones on Monday June 9th 5PM PDT, I've updated a map with Drupal local groups. Full Map

Real map after the break.

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We have just launched the Beta release of Sparkle*Shelf (http://sparkleshelf.com), a site that provides beauty enthusiasts with the latest information and tutorials on fashion, hair and makeup. We currently host fifteen regular feature writers, who contribute a total of 3-5 articles a day.

Sparkle*Shelf is also a place for members to connect with other like-minded members. There are basic social networking features as well as a number of beauty related applications/games, such as polls, quizzes and "smack-downs".

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Eureka! Science News just launched – it is a site dedicated to provide the very latest science news, but with a special twist – it is entirely automated! There is no human editor behind it - it finds relationships between news stories from all major science sites and regroups, categorizes, ranks, tags, finds related press releases and publishes them directly on the site. The result is an efficient overview of everything happening in science, right when it happens. The following details how we built the site.

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Developing new modules for Drupal 6? Porting older modules? Packt Publishing has just released a new book, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, by Matt Butcher. This book is targeted toward PHP programmers interested in Drupal 6 module development.

The book takes a hands-on approach. Each chapter walks through the development of a module, theme, or installation profile. As the reader progresses through the book, she or he will be able to create increasingly sophisticated Drupal modules.

If you're new to Drupal development (but have PHP development experience), this book will get you developing modules right away. Are you a more seasoned Drupal developer just looking to get some modules updated? This book focuses on many of the new features, changes, and improvements made in Drupal 6. Check out the sample chapter Creating Our First Module (1.3M PDF) to get a feel for how the book is written.

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Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is Packt's new book, written by Michael Peacock, aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. With more and more websites aiming to integrate all of their components to give a more slick and streamlined effect for users - by using Drupal e-Commerce, the site and the store are already integrated providing both a powerful website and a powerful online store.

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The Horizon Interactive Awards winners were announced over the past weekend. Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Several Drupal-powered sites, developed by studio:module and pingVision were among the winners.

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Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

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We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.

Many of the projects this year build on work done during previous Summer of Codes. Drupal core will benefit from a new aggregator, improved search scoring, OpenID attribute exchange, revamped help system and color module, SimpleTest security scanner and generalized Validation API. There are also projects focused on improvements to the Drupal.org infrastructure, including ApacheSolr search, version control API, and the much demanded plugin manager for secure, automated updating of module and themes.

Some of Drupal's major contributed modules will also gain, including Views as widgets, Views RDF/XML/JSON output, Views & CCK chart support, extensions to Nodequeue and OAuth support for Services.

There's also a healthy component of brand new functionality, including an image manipulation GUI, memetracker, bookings API, Icon module, document import module and Usability testing suite.

If you'd like to keep up on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2008 working group and help out in whatever ways you can. Also check out Planet SoC to read blog entries from Summer of Code students across all mentoring organizations.

Here's to another great summer! :) Read on to find more details about Drupal's accepted proposals.

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The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.
--Dries Buytaert, in Businessweek

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Also among the top innovators are Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, Joe Green of Causes, Drew Houston of Dropbox, David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, and others.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

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Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

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Szeged city view from the Tisza river

At this year's Drupalcon we're turning Szeged, Hungary into Drupaltown!

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Szeged, Hungary from August 27 to 30, 2008 in the Library and Conference Center of the Szeged University. With a thousand Drupal enthusiasts expected we'll be turning this picturesque student city into a true Drupaltown!

Drupalcon has been a major success for the Drupal community, with every conference reaching out to more and more people. Like Boston, Drupalcon Szeged will again provide ample opportunities both for business people, developers, themers, designers, and users in the community: there will be a code sprint, plenty of space for BOF sessions, a job fair and, of course, plenty of opportunity for networking. Start planning, buy your tickets early and be prepared to meet your Drupal community in Szeged, Hungary; Drupaltown!

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Given the success of David Mercer's first Drupal title for beginners, Packt has published a new and improved edition to go with the latest release of Drupal. The new book, still targetted at beginners and intermediates, builds on its predecessor to provide a steeper launching ramp for everyone who still feels they're not yet a pro.

Changes to the new version include:

• Slimmed down writing, to provide faster flowing and more concentrated information
• Updates to all the original text to reflect the enhanced features of D6
• Vastly expanded the range of topics
• Increased the depth and level of coverage for many topics

Despite the fact that I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained, the new version is over 330 pages. This gives you an idea of how much new material went into this edition in order to bring it up to speed with this most impressive of Drupal releases. This new book is as much an overhaul of the last as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

I hope that this title will meet the following goals that I have personally set for it:

1. To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club

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Spirit Library is library of spiritual messages and information. It contains thousands of articles/messages from spiritual speakers and authors which are filterable and sortable in different ways. The site extensively uses the excellent Panels 2 modules alongside Views.

This is the third incarnation of the site, and the one that finally gets very close to where we wanted to be with it. The first version was launched 18 months ago as a Plone site, as that was the CMS i had most experience with, but after a while it became too restrictive and we started looking in Drupals direction. For the second version we migrated the site from Plone, and the change coincided with a large jump in traffic and at the same time gave the vps it was hosted on more room as it used less server resources (especially memory).

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Myplay.com is a redesign and re-branding of Sony's Musicbox site which showcases SonyBMG's artists, providing free access to their videos, music and photos. Users can create lists of their favorite artists as well as review their music and embed widgets of their favorite artist's content into other sites. Sony Musicbox was originally implemented by the Lullabots who provided the base framework for this redesign. Thanks to their diligence and teaching as well as excellent tools provided by Earl Miles (Panels 2, Views and Nodequeue), three people (Suzi Arnold, Jerad Bitner and David Burns) were able to accomplish this task in just over a month.

This case study documents how the site is put together, and provides implementation details on how we've combined numerous important contributed modules to build a "next generation" Drupal site.

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