Do you want to know what's been done and what's coming in Drupal 7, how to make your site hacker proof, or see why walkah hates Drupal? Just visit dc2009.drupalcon.org.

The videos of more than 100 presentations that were given at DrupalCon DC are now freely available from the conference website, alongside information about the speaker and about the session topic. A ton of great information was shared at DrupalCon DC, and we wanted to continue to get it out to anyone who's interested. To this end, we turned the DrupalCon DC website into a conference archive with video of each session embedded in it so that anyone who missed a session, missed the entire conference, or just learned what Drupal is last week can still benefit from the knowledge shared in Washington, DC.

Go to dc2009.drupalcon.org to watch session videos, and thanks again to the crew that recorded all of the sessions!

read more

We're stacking up karma points during this recession: over the weekend more than sixty people gathered at the DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Various experts in web design attended coming from all over Ireland and as far as Scotland, England and the US. The best turn out was in absolute newbies - over half of the group who had traveled from all over Ireland.

As an incentive to push the learning curves we worked together to provide 3 Irish charities: Zikomo, Rural Science Association and Shadowbox Theatre with brand spanking new websites!

The plan was conceived 5 months ago when Alan Burke (alanburke) and Stéphane Corlosquet (scor) were brainstorming what to do for the next Irish Drupal event to bring it home to Galway. They wanted to do something different and make it over 2 days to take advantage of the presentation style of a BarCamp and to include a site-building challenge. Realizing they would need a great deal of help they recruited Stella Power (stella), Heather James (heather) for their expertise from organizing the previous DrupalCamp in Dublin.

We, the organizers, were impressed by the number of people who turned up as we expected 40-50. The rooms filled up fast and we had barely enough food for everybody. Alan had the insight to have a giant kettle available to provide plenty of tea and coffee with "loads of biccies" to all the attendees.

read more

Digital Dollhouse is a virtual world where girls of all ages are empowered to become their own interior designers. Members can paint, furnish and decorate their own virtual dream houses complete with plants, pets and dolls, and even purchase and regift items in a virtual economy.

Designed and built in Drupal from the ground up, Digital Dollhouse uses Drupal as a front- and back-end engine and Flash for the primary front-end game play. Drupal was selected as a development platform because of its robust and extensible framework and excellent integration with Flash/Flex applications. The high quality and availability of third-party modules greatly helped in the decision, as well. We found that Drupal is an excellent choice for managing virtual worlds with virtual goods and currencies.

The heart of Digital Dollhouse’s business model is virtual goods micro-transactions. A member can visit the online store (which Digital Dollhouse calls the “Boutique”), purchase an item and then play with it in a virtual dollhouse (which we named the “playarea”). Userpoints proved to be a robust and outstanding solution for all of our virtual currency needs. Digital Dollhouse is also greatly indebted to the developers of the Invite, Buddylist, Voting API, Ubercart and Ubercart Userpoints modules.

In 2008, Jesyca Durchin and and David Schnepp of Digital Playspace chose Exaltation of Larks, a development and design firm in Boston and Los Angeles, to lead the development of Digital Dollhouse. From the beginning, there were many indications that Digital Dollhouse would be a success.

read more

Bonnier Publications A/S publish magazines in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Holland. All the magazines have websites, some of which are quite significant and have a large amount of traffic and reasonable revenue, while others are simple presentation sites. Altogether Bonnier Publications (BP) has more than 40 sites in five different languages.

For many years, BP has used the Java-based CMS Polopoly for all their sites, but this has not been optimal and especially programming the sites was far too slow, even for the smallest adjustments.

During the summer of 2008, BP decided that their CMS technology needed replacing to enable their editorial staff and sales departments to take full advantage of the Internet's dynamic potential. They chose Drupal CMS, and Peytz & Co. was appointed strategic partner and asked to handle the platform migration.

read more

In October of 2008, Packt Publishing launched a pilot program called RAW (Read As we Write). In the RAW program, draft versions of each chapter are released as the author writes them. The initial book chosen for the pilot was Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery.

At the end of March, Packt sent the finished book to the printers. The final version, improved by copious feedback from the Drupal community, is now available in both e-book and soft cover.

Packt typically offers a discount of 10% to all Drupal.org users (as I understand it, that offer is also good for Learning Drupal 6 Module Development). But the community's involvement has been great on this project. To say thanks, Packt is allowing me to share my discount code here. To get 15% off of the purchase price of this book, order the book from PacktPub.com and enter the following code in the promotional code box during checkout: DrupalJSjQ15.

Packt also contributes a portion of every book sale back to Drupal. So purchasing any Packt book on Drupal provides financial support for the project.

read more

Sharon Waxman, a former Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, has a new Hollywood News site called TheWrap.com. In 2008, Sharon and her team reviewed various content management platforms for the news site and after considering the various available options, decided to use Drupal as their content management platform.

In July 2008, Appnovation Technologies was chosen to develop the site. The site development went through various iterations of development cycle, and the site was completed in December 2008. The site was launched on January 19th.

In February, the site had over 130,000 visits and 650,000 page views. In just one month, it grew to over 240,000 unique visits and over 900,000 page views.

read more

Every year, CNet goes to the people and asks what the best Web 2.0 applications and services are. The people have spoken, and Drupal has been nominated, along with 299 others. To put Drupal into the coveted top 100, we need you to vote. Voting continues until April 30, so don't wait, vote now.

Drupal won in 2007, and again in 2008. Can Drupal win in 2009? We sure hope so, but it will take your help. Please take a few seconds of your time to vote and help make Drupal a Webware 100 winner in 2009. Drupal is in the Social Networking & Publishing category.

In addition to voting you can put this fine graphic in your own blog posts encouraging others to vote for Drupal as well. Please link to either of the following:

• http://www.webware.com/100
• http://www.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2009/poll/social.html?tag=mncol

Thank you!

read more

Wellstone Action! is a national center for training and leadership development for the progressive movement. Founded in January 2003, Wellstone Action trains, educates, mobilizes and organizes a large network of progressive individuals and organizations.

The original Wellstone.org website was built using a proprietary CMS system. As the site aged and communications needs evolved, staff had to increasingly work around that system and it's constraints. As such, part of the motivation for a new website was to not only present information clearly, but to do so in a way that was open to evolution and improvement over time, making Drupal and ideal fit for their needs.

Wellstone Action's Drupal-powered website launched in the Spring of 2008. With roughly a year of operating perspective, we can begin to assess the overall effectiveness of the project. Accordingly, this case-study is intended to:

1. Document the process used to manage this project and make decisions
2. Discuss the overall success of the project (and thereby evaluate the process)
3. Spark more conversation in the Drupal community about the best ways to produce the best possible results for all of our clients and their Drupal projects

read more

The Drupal core developers have a long history of making user experience improvements. The developers have made it easier to install, to update, to internationalize, to customize, to theme, to find help, to recover from errors, and to interact. A few years ago, the Drupal project lead, Dries, wrote about The Ockham's Razor Principle of Content Management Systems which stated
Given two functionally equivalent content management systems, the simplest one should be selected.

In order to make Drupal 7 the simplest CMS to use, Mark Boulton and I have developed a user experience strategy as part of an effort previously announced by Dries. You don't have to be an expert core developer or user experience designer to help us make Drupal simpler to use. Even the simple act of reading this strategy or mentioning to someone that we are working on making Drupal easier to use can make a difference. With that in mind we have drafted strategy statements and goals which we hope to use as ’stars to sail our ship by’ on this project.

read more

We finished crunching the numbers from DrupalCon DC. You can check out all the final figures – including attendance stats and financial numbers – in DrupalCon DC By the Numbers: Community, Profit, and Sustainability posted on the DrupalCon DC website. Give it a read, and please post any feedback or questions you have.

read more

The Publius Project is an effort of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The mission of the Publius Project is to foster public dialogue and create a durable public record on the question of how the Internet should be controlled, and by whom. The project brings together a distinguished collection of Internet observers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, activists, technologists, and other experts to write short essays on this topic. The Publius Project approached DharmaTech because its existing WordPress site was too limited and "blog-centric." The Publius Project needed an easy-to-use website that effectively created a forum for discussing the pressing issues revolving around how cyberspace is governed.

Mia Moran of Emtype provided the graphic design for the project. Caroline Nolan of the Berkman Center served as project coordinator for the Publius Project. Jason Hill of DharmaTech was the lead programmer and Tony Guzman of DharmaTech was the project manager.

read more

Links to all 102 videos were made available on March 13, 2009:

• d.o - DrupalCon DC 2009 Videos
• archive.org - search for drupalcon dc
• dc2009.drupalcon.org (in the comments of each session)

A list of the 9 sessions that were not recorded can be found at:
http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/news/almost-all-session-videos-drupalcon-dc-...
If you have of a recording of any of these and/or any BoF sessions, please post them online and let everyone at d.o know. :o)

• 76 sessions (68%) were online within 24 hours
• 83 sessions (75%) were online within 48 hours
• 102 sessions (92%) were online within 5 days of the conference, including:
  • 97 presentation sessions
  • 4 keynote sessions
  • 1 closing session

read more

Earlier today, Google announced the list of organizations that have been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2009, and we are thrilled to announce that Drupal has been selected once again! This will mark the Drupal project's fifth year of participation in this fantastic program, which provides a great opportunity for the Drupal community to grow our ranks of dedicated and talented new contributors, award existing long-term contributors, and get some exciting new coding projects done at the same time! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code FAQ and program timeline.

read more

To make the impact of different security advisories and announcements easier to see, they are now separated by type.

Drupal core security advisories: http://drupal.org/security
RSS feed for Drupal core: http://drupal.org/security/rss.xml

Contributed project security advisories: http://drupal.org/security/contrib
RSS feed for contributed projects: http://drupal.org/security/contrib/rss.xml

Public service announcements: http://drupal.org/security/psa
RSS feed for announcements: http://drupal.org/security/psa/rss.xml

We encourage those using RSS readers to track security-related developments to subscribe to all three of these feeds.

All posts to each of these three forums will still be sent to the one security announcements e-mail list. To subscribe to that e-mail list, once logged in, go to your user profile page and subscribe to the security newsletter on the Edit » My newsletters tab.

All future public service announcements will only be posted to the Public service announcements page and feed.

read more

Drupal 6 Social Networking, by Michael Peacock, is a new book from Packt Publishing, aimed at readers wishing to create a Social Networking website. With Social Networking being a very powerful and popular concept on the Internet, this book discusses the benefits of creating your own Social Network over utilising existing Social Networks, and guides the reader through setting up a Social Network of their own.

After discussing Social Networking concepts, the book covers the basics of Drupal including installation, configuration and administration, before looking at building a powerful Social Networking website, including:

• User generated content with Drupal core modules
• Managing users and enhancing their profiles
• Enabling user interaction and communication as well as communicating with our users
• Creating a simple map-based module to show how we can extend the network with custom features by creating our own modules
• Customising the theme, and creating custom themes giving the Social Network a unique look of its own
• Deploying the Social Network, and keeping it running smoothly
• Promoting the Social Network so that its user base, and community contributions grow

read more

[Update: The Survey Monkey account is now increased.]

Did you attend Drupalcon D.C? Did you want to attend Drupalcon D.C but couldn't make it?

We have lots of questions and you have answers!

Take the Drupalcon D.C survey and help make Drupalcon your conference! We are looking for responses from those who attended and those who were unable to attend the conference. We want to hear from you.

Help make future DrupalCons, including DrupalCon Paris 2009, even better!

Click over to take the survey.

Today's Documentation Sprint at DrupalCon DC was a brilliantly productive success! For folks who are unfamiliar with the sprint concept, as I was before today, here's what happened: folks gathered both physically in DC and virtually on IRC (#drupal-docs) to come up with a list of documentation tasks that need tackling. We then divided up into small, ad-hoc teams to collaboratively tackle those tasks.

By our conservative estimate, more than 70 people showed up in person. Folks also participated online in a great demonstration of the potential for real-time collaboration despite geographical distance. All of the work was done in the hopes of creating cleaner, clearer, and more accessible and useful documentation for members of the Drupal community, whatever their skill level or familiarity with Drupal might be. Likewise, people at all levels of familiarity and experience with Drupal participated in the documentation sprint itself.

read more

Following the final day of DrupalCon presentations, we're hosting a code and documentation sprint, both at the DrupalCon conference facility and online. You can help! Documentation sprinters are coordinating tasks on wiki-style pages and talking on IRC at #drupal-docs (see instructions for joining).

Six new Drupal projects will make it easier for anyone to join the digital conversation by lowering the barriers to online publishing. These projects have received a portion of the $485,380 in funding provided by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI). The winners of the Knight Drupal Initiative were announced at the DrupalCon conference in Washington, DC.

read more

Over the past two and a half months, Sony Music rolled out some of their top musical artist sites in new multilingual versions based on Drupal 6. P!nk, Beyonce, Britney Spears, John Legend, Kelly Clarkson and The Fray were among the first to go multilingual, with many more on the way.

Before introducing multilingual support, Sony Music had a solid platform built on Drupal 5 from which they delivered dozens of major artist websites with interactive and social networking features. But having their sites in English only presented significant barriers. Going multilingual would allow them to expand fan bases and reach out to new audiences.

In addition to their team of in-house developers and other contractors, Sony Music sponsored CivicActions to improve internationalization support in Drupal, contributing back all development work. CivicActions guided the internationalization of Sony Music's platform and ensured stability as they upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Accomplishing these aims required an intensive focus on reviewing and upgrading the large selection of core and contributed modules Sony Music relies on. Sony Music's investment in improving the Drupal platform demonstrates the sound business case for contributing back.

Here's a summary of how we approached the work and how this project produced internationalization improvements throughout Drupal core and contrib that can be used on any site wanting to serve users in multiple languages and countries.

read more