With Drupal 7 down to 30 critical bugs, and Drupalcon Copenhagen just around the corner, it's only a matter of time before Drupal 7.0 ships. We want to make sure our Drupal 7 documentation is in great shape for this fantastic new release, and the Documentation Team could really use YOUR help getting there!

read more

PulpMX.com was launched in early 2009 as a place for well-known motocross columnist Steve Matthes to post his musings about the sport and its history. Originally conceived of as a modest site, it was built in early 2009 using a stock theme with a handful of custom images, the FCKeditor and IMCE modules to provide a built-in visual editor, and little else. Over time it had grown organically as needs developed: CCK, Filefield, and SWF Tools for posting audio interviews in a built-in player, for example. In early 2010 PulpMX also took on discussion forums from a site that was no longer able to host them, so an existing phpBB installation was also imported.

The site was developing a growing following and it was becoming obvious that it needed an overhaul to better reflect the character of the site, and provide more cohesive and initiative navigation among the quickly expanding areas of the site. Says Steve:

Originally I had gotten Tooth and Nail to design me a basic site for blogs and photos, what they gave me was way better than I had thought I needed. The traffic and the new media things that I was doing (podcasts, slide shows and a live internet show) demanded that I get something new and fresh. I was now big-time I suppose.

read more

Get ready to meet and learn from the top Drupal developers, designers and architects from around the world.

Save €31 and get your DrupalCon Copenhagen ticket now at the current price of €279, because on August 16th at 8am CEST the ticket price will go up to €310 + VAT.

Go to the DrupalCon Copenhagen site to buy your ticket for the conference.

Your ticket includes:

• 94 sessions spread out over 3 days
• Ad hoc BOF (birds of a feather) sessions
• Access to the Core Developer Summit and the post-conference code and documentation sprint
• Access to the ChX Coders Lounge where you can hang out and code all night
• Access to FooBar, the official bar of DrupalCon Copenhagen
• …and, last but not least, a chance to meet your fellow Drupalers

read more

In mid-2009, TopNotchThemes started building Fusion, a theme system that would pave new ground for Drupal themes. Along with this new technology, we started dreaming of our ideal website where products could be deployed automatically, customers had access to a much more friendly account area, and of course a brand new look and feel for this new line of themes.

Our current Drupal 5 website at TopNotchThemes.com (to remain active until remaining themes are ported to Fusion) is showing its age and does not have the control we need in order to be able to adapt content and features as our visitors demand.

Launched this spring, FusionDrupalThemes.com is not only a showcase for our products, but a wonderful showcase of community and commercial synergy. It integrates Ubercart, Organic Groups, and the Project module suite to create a feature rich platform for selling code-based products.

read more

The Deutsche Aids-Hilfe (DAH) is the leading German non-governmental organization that deals with the concerns of people living with HIV/AIDS and helps raise awareness of effective HIV prevention techniques.
As the governing body for more than 120 local AIDS service organizations, it supports this work at many different levels.

The DAH website, aidshilfe.de, is one of the organization’s main communication channels. It offers information on HIV and other sexual transmitted infections and covers the field of counseling for private matters. The website also provides contact information for local self-help-centers, a broad selection of free information material, workshops, community features, etc.

Work on the aidshilfe.de project was supported by many partners. Christoph Schüßler designed the website, which was implemented in Drupal by Berlin-based Werk21. The new aidshilfe.de is a step forward toward a future-proof system that features an attractive new design, interactive features, user-friendly community functionality and great usability.

read more

TicketCake.com is an event ticketing and promotion start-up that recently launched using Drupal as its framework. The website features an innovative design by White Label Graphics which balances functionality and simplicity.

Because Drupal has many ways to display dynamic content, finding the right way to implement a design can be a problem in itself. To overcome this obstacle, the Ticket Cake team focused a significant amount of time creating wireframes for the project.

Drupal’s unique ability to display content in various ways made the process of developing wireframes a constant back and forth. With each iteration, the team updated price quotes, layouts, and site flow.

“Throughout the construction of the wireframes, we always looked to a keep it simple philosophy that ended up being vital,” said Joe Henriod, head of the Ticket Cake business development team. “Measure twice, cut once.”

read more

Grandiflora is a boutique florist based in Sydney, Australia. Although you might not have heard of them before, you've probably seen their work in the pages of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and many other fashion magazines. They've also created the floral design for many celebrity weddings and events in the Australia's premier harbour city.

Recently Grandiflora were interested in updating their identity and marketing (including their website), so they tasked the team at House of Laudanum to create a custom online shopping experience to sell their products online. The previous website was a custom CMS written in Perl and while it did have some e-commerce facilities, it required updating to be a more integrated shopping solution.

Why was Drupal chosen for the project?

Although WordPress was considered early on in the decision making process, the team chose Drupal mainly because of the Ubercart module and some other contributed modules which laid the foundation for the integrated payment solution required for the project.

read more

After reviewing 240 sessions submitted for the conference, the track chairs, the Copenhagen team and the Drupal Association are proud to present the DrupalCon Copenhagen program.

The total of 94 sessions is made up of 83 regular sessions, 6 platinum sponsor sessions, 3 keynotes and 2 rounds of lightning talks.

The session selection accounts for many factors including attendee votes, addressing the breadth of interests of DrupalCon attendees, and providing a balanced and compelling program. For example, some sessions were picked because they were essential for introducing new developers to Drupal, other sessions were selected because they present important local Drupal business cases, etc.

If you proposed a session that didn't make it into the program, please consider presenting it at the Unconference on August 23rd or run it as a Birds of a Feather session. We will be adding more information about these options to the website in the coming weeks.

You can either see the sessions selected for each track below, or take a look at the program overview. Please bear in mind that this is not the final program and that sessions are likely to be moved around as we refine it.

read more

At the Drupal Association retreat in San Francisco, the general assembly set the completion of the drupal.org redesign as its number one priority for 2010. The assembly agreed to fund five contracts to help eliminate obstacles that had prevented the community from completing the redesign.

Five key roles were identified: Architect, Solr developer, Project module developer, and an infrastructure developer. The association also elected to upgrade Drupal.org code repository from CVS to Git to help maintain Drupal.org as the hub of Drupal development.

Job descriptions were developed in conjunction with both the redesign volunteers and the Drupal.org project managers, Kieran Lal, Chris Strahl, and Lisa Rex. The job descriptions were then posted to groups.drupal.org for 3 weeks. Approximately 35 applications were received and a dozen interviews were conducted by the project management team. The contracts were negotiated with Drupal Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, to whom the project team reports directly. Contractors work day-to-day with the project management team. The association will pay for the contract work using the funds raised through memberships, advertising, partnerships, affiliates, and DrupalCon sponsorships.

read more

The Drupal Association has been working to figure out the most effective ways it can help local user groups organize Drupal camps. We quickly realized that there was a lack of data about how past and present Drupal camps were currently being organized. With that in mind, we created an online survey for DrupalCamp organizers that would help everyone understand how Drupal camps currently worked.

Over the course of about 7 weeks, we collected a total of 51 responses, with 6 duplicates and unusable, making our sample size 45 Drupal camps. In a previous article posted on the Drupal Event Organization Drupal group, I posted the results from the first 31 responses. Since that article was published (and because of it), we had an additional 14 responses, making the data that much more valuable.

Overall, the 45 camps that completed the survey had over 6,200 participants, a combined budget of almost $250,000, and were organized by over 400 volunteers.

The resulting data is extremely valuable to both the Drupal Association and Drupal user groups around the world. The Drupal Association now has an idea of how camps are currently being organized and can make informed decisions about how to help future organizers. Local user groups can use this data to help plan future events. In particular, the average cost-per-particpant and participants-per-volunteers data (highlighted below) should be considered when planning future camps.

read more

Our fifth Drupal 7 alpha version was released a little over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the sixth (and hopefully final) alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes many critical bug fixes, a nearly working upgrade path, and a new default core theme: Bartik!

Please see the release notes for more details.

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. On or about August 1, 2010 (or when the upgrade path is working, whichever comes first) we will create a new official Drupal 7 release. If this list is fixed, it will be a beta release. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta within the next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

read more

We are proud to announce the keynote speakers at DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010: Rasmus Lerdorf (topic to be crowdsourced), Jeremy Keith (Design of HTML5) and Dries Buytaert (State of Drupal).

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead
Tuesday, August 24th

Dries Buytaert will discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss the final preparations for the release of Drupal 7, the Drupal.org redesign, and the plans for Drupal 8.

Dries Buytaert is passionate about the web, open source, and photography. He is the original creator and project lead of Drupal, an open source social publishing system. He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also working on Mollom, a service that helps you identify content quality and that stops website spam.

Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Project Founder
Wednesday, August 25th

Tell Rasmus which topic you would like him to focus on by leaving a comment on the DrupalCon Copenhagen site.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for creating the PHP project in 1995 and he has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. Rasmus was most recently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! for over 7 years before joining WePay in 2010. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow @rasmus on Twitter.

Jeremy Keith, Author of HTML5 For Web Designers
Thursday, August 26th

Everyone's talking about the benefits of HTML5 for Web applications but the specification also introduces an extra layer of semantic richness to our Web documents. These additions aren't wishful thinking for some far-flung future: you can start using them today. That's because the design principles driving HTML5 are steeped in pragmatism. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it's a website, a content management system, or the very language that underpins the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the Web consultancy firm Clearleft. He wrote the books DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, and most recently, HTML5 For Web Designers. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane.

read more

On August 23rd, the day before the main conference kicks off, you'll be able to attend training sessions facilitated by leading Drupal experts. These sessions will take place at the main conference venue.

The training sessions will cover:

• Performance and Scalability
• Drupal Powered E-Commerce
• Module development
• Security: process, code and hands-on training

It is possible to attend the training sessions even if you're not going to the main conference. If that's the case, simply buy a ticket for the training session you'd like to attend.

If you buy a ticket for a training session together with a ticket for the conference, we will subtract €30 from the price of your conference ticket (making it €249 + VAT). The discount will be applied automatically during checkout.

Check out the training page for more information on the training sessions.

read more

ThinkDrop Consulting and the non-profit organization MACILE are collaborating on a pilot program to introduce open-source technology and Drupal to children living in less-advantaged communities, helping them overcome the hurdles that prevent them from openly accessing and sharing information.  In July, we will travel to Itabo, Dominican Republic to teach a two-week class to 6th-12th graders and educators on Internet Technology, Open Source, and Drupal.

In addition to educating both students and teachers on Internet technology and Drupal, we will be documenting the process using OpenAtrium and releasing our curriculum under Creative Commons licensing. Our goal is to create a consistent curriculum to teach kids around the world who may have not ever even used a computer.

Donate Today!

We are seeking $8,000 in funding through Kickstarter, an innovative website that allows users to fund creative endeavors. The funds we are seeking will pay for full-time coding and project development, travel and housing expenses in the Dominican Republic, and additional computers for educators and students. As we will be working in less advantaged communities, maintaining access to consistent electricity and the internet will be a challenge, so a portion of our time will be spent developing a model approach to this problem.

Although we have set our funding goal at $8,000, we hope to exceed it. Any additional funds we receive will be used to continue expanding the Internet Technology programs of COSOLA and MACILE. 

read more

A couple of days ago, we announced the track chairs and published the final descriptions of the six tracks at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

To make sure that everyone has had a chance to submit a session targeted at a specific track, we have decided to move the session deadline back a week. The revised schedule is as follows:

• The final deadline for session submissions is July 4th.
• Voting will take place from July 5th until July 11th.
• The initial schedule will be published on July 18th.

We have enjoyed seeing all the sessions submitted so far, but it has become apparent that the lack of detailed track descriptions has made it difficult to categorize some sessions. Hopefully, the track descriptions will make it easier for you to target your session at a specific audience.

Please consider the following track descriptions when submitting a session proposal:

• Introducing Drupal
  Chaired by Boris Doesborg
  For users and developers new to Drupal.
• Theming, Design & Usability
  Chaired by Roy Scholten
  For people who focus on usability, user experience, and design.
• Code & Development
  Chaired by Gábor Hojtsy
  For people interested in Drupal's architecture and the future of its codebase.
• Configuration, Set-Up & Performance
  Chaired by Florian Loretan
  For people who want to spend less time coding and more time working on the content of their sites.
• Drupal for Business
  Chaired by Jakub Suchý
  For people who using Drupal as a tool for running their business.
• Providing Professional Drupal Services
  Chaired by Thomas Barregren
  For people who provide Drupal-related professional services.

We can't wait to receive your session proposals!

read more

You may already have heard of Packt, the fast-growing publisher of hardcopy and digital books on specific technologies, due to the large number of Drupal books it has published over the years. However, you may not be aware that they recently relaunched their website, www.PacktPub.com, using Drupal as its framework.

Packt Publishing is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. Packt has so far published over 15 Drupal books and remains committed to producing practical solution-based books for Drupal developers, along with the best available online bookstore. The new website, which took 12 months from design to launch, was developed with UK-based Bluetel Solutions. The new version not only adds to the existing functionality of Packt’s original website, but now also offers a new, enhanced customer experience with an advanced design.

read more

We are continuing to work to make DrupalCon Copenhagen as awesome as possible, but we wanted to take some time to give you an update on what we have been working on lately:

As you may have noticed, the deadline for submitting a session has been moved back to June 27th. Voting on the sessions opens on June 28th and closes on July 8th. We will notify all speakers and post the full schedule on July 18th. The votes for the different sessions will be used by the track chairs to inform their decision of which sessions get selected.

If your session isn't selected for one of the main conference tracks, please consider doing it as a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session instead. We will post more information about how to announce your BOF sessions as we get closer to the conference.

If you are not attending one of the training sessions on August 23rd, we would love to see you at the Unconference. This will be a perfect opportunity to connect with the local open source community and to discuss issues outside of the Drupal-sphere. The Unconference will be run BarCamp-style and it will be free to attend, but please register in advance to help us determine how much coffee we need to brew.

read more

PitBulls.org is a community and information site centered around the American Pit Bull Terrier, usually referred to as Pit Bulls.

Pit Bulls get a lot of coverage in the media, usually negative, because there is rampant fear of the breed. They are also often the target of Breed Specific Legislation (BSL). PitBulls.org aims to share another perspective, those of passionate Pit Bull owners. The main mission of the site is to convey that Pit Bulls make great family pets, to get the word out that a dog is only a reflection how it is treated and raised, and to provide a central hub where owners can connect and share their pictures and stories.

The site was conceived and developed by PropDrop Web Development and Marketing. PropDrop not only does client work, but also performs web niche analysis and develops in-house web properties based on that research in order to gain market share in a wide variety of areas. PitBulls.org is one of these properties. It also doesn't hurt that we are dog lovers and own a Pit Bull/Lab mix named Bauer, so we are our own audience in some sense.

PropDrop uses Drupal exclusively for its in-house projects, because we can create a community and information site with some advanced features in under 2 weeks, with everything optimized for search with little effort. It also gives us the opportunity to expand a site's feature set in the future without interfering with current functionality, taking a site in directions that might not be possible with other content management systems.

read more

On June 12, 2010, the Los Angeles Drupal user group is hosting Git with Drupal 7, a one-day event featuring both a Git bootcamp followed by a Drupal 7 code sprint. To make this event as accessible as possible, we're broadcasting the Git bootcamp via WebEx conference from 10am-1pm PDT. Please join us!

Drupal.org is moving from using the CVS version control system to Git for the development of Drupal 8. As Drupal core development is migrated to Git, thousands of developers will need to learn Git in order to help develop Drupal 8 as well as their own contributed modules for Drupal 7 when the contrib repository is moved to Git later this year.

The importance of moving to a modern version control system was outlined last year in step 5 of Dries' 8 Steps to Drupal 8. Git was selected after a lengthy evaluation discussion, and Drupal.org's migration to Git was the subject of The Exodus: Leading Drupal out of CVS, a session at DrupalCon San Francisco earlier this year. That session was well-attended and featured members of the Drupal.org Git Migration Team, including Damien Tournoud (DamZ), Derek Wright (dww), Angie Byron (webchick) and Sam Boyer (sdboyer).

During both the bootcamp and code sprint, we'll be gathered in the #drupal-la IRC channel and all are welcome to join us. We also recorded the git bootcamp and posted the video online on blip.tv and on iTunes.

read more

Act now if you want to get your DrupalCon Copenhagen ticket at the current price of €249. On June 28th at 8am CEST the ticket price will go up to €279.

Go to the conference site to buy your ticket for the conference, which will be held August 23-27.

Your ticket includes:

• 90 sessions spread out over 3 days
• Ad hoc BOF (birds of a feather) sessions
• Access to pre- and post-conference code and documentation sprints
• Access to the coder lounge where you can hang out and code when you're not attending sessions
• Access to fooBar, the official bar of DrupalCon Copenhagen
• …and, last but not least, a chance to meet your fellow Drupalers

read more