By Robin Monks on

Welcome back to the Drupal newsletter! We have received great acknowledgment from the community, and have had a generous supply of content thanks to our contributors. As always, we are a completely open newsletter. Good Drupal-related content is always welcomed and encouraged!

As you probably already have heard, Drupal 4.6.3 was released this week. The new XML-RPC vulnerability this addresses would allow an attacker to take over the server.

A code freeze in preparation of 4.7 was also announced this month. The freeze, scheduled to happen on September 1st, will move the latest HEAD code into a new 4.7 branch to be worked on, and debugged, before final release.

The Google Summer of Code (SoC) workers has also made some great enhancements to the codebase, adding many new modules and features for Drupal users to enjoy.

There is a lot more to discover this month, so let’s get started...

Robin Monks,
Editor

In this issue...

Upcoming Events – Find out what events are coming up for Drupal lovers.
Drupal Interview – This month’s interview with Dries Buytaert, Kieran Lal and Boris Mann
Drupal Development Quickies – What have the developers thought up this month?
Drupal Tips – How to make Drupal do things you didn’t think it could.
Drupal Sightings – Showcasing some of the best new Drupal sites around the world!

Editor’s Note…

We are using shurl.org’s short URL system to track our newsletter click rates, so don’t be alarmed when instead of going to http://somewhere.org the link instead reads http://shurl.org/somewhere.

Upcoming events

Euro-OSCON

After the very successful O’Reilly’s OSCON in the USA, there will be a Drupal conference during the Euro-OSCON in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This event will take place from October 16 to October 20 and will be both within the OSCON conference (paid) and separate from the OSCON conference (free).

The goals of the mini Drupal conference will be:

  • to meet up with fellow Drupal coders and users,
  • promote Drupal by showing off the power of the code and the community to the OSCON people,
  • connect with other Open Source Software projects and
  • ... just have a good time!

(Gaining world dominance is just something we do in-between)

No permanent agenda has been made yet, but it seems we will be discussing three important issues that are centralized around the code (release cycle, new features), the infrastructure (the new hardware, the new infra team) and the community (promotion of Drupal, starting the foundation).

You are encouraged to come to this event; we will try to organize a cheap hotel or place to stay for the Drupal people. So even when you are not attending the Euro-OSCON, there is a lot to do in Amsterdam and you will meet with all your favorite Drupal coders as well.
We also have a list of persons that will attend these meetings.. If you want to come as well, make sure to edit your profile.

Bert Boerland will be coordinating this event. If you are willing to help him out, contact him. If you want to discuss broader issues, please use the conference mailing list. Any feedback regarding the place, the agenda or potential sponsors is greatly appreciated. But most of all make sure to be in Amsterdam on October 16th!

Linux world expo

Join us at the LinuxWorldExpo in London, Olympia, October 5-6, to learn about Drupal and meet face to face with other drupaleers. We will be present at the .Org village alongside Mozilla Europe, opensourcematters.org (formerly known as Mambo), Debian, Gentoo, OpenBSD and a lot of other great projects.

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Drupal interview

This month Robin Monks will be interviewing Dries Buytaert, Kieran Lal and Boris Mann about OSCON Portland, future events and future expectations.

Robin Monks: Could you each briefly describe your role with Drupal?

Dries Buytaert: I'm the Drupal founder and project leader.

Boris Mann: I'm a long time Drupal evangelist and contributor, as well as being the founder of Bryght, one of the first commercial companies focused on Drupal.

Kieran Lal: I am the development manager for CivicSpace Labs. I coordinate Drupal development to help us accomplish CivicSpace Lab's community goals.

Robin: Thanks! How do you guys feel OSCON was in terms of Drupal marketing?

Boris: The lead up to OSCON was a bit rushed, and it was our first real "marketing" event. However, thanks to good work (especially by Roland Tanglao, Chris Messina, and Nate Angell) we managed to have a very good presence at our OSCON booth, as well as pull off a successful DrupalCON event at PSU.
Next time, I'd like to see us with at least one published book, more marketing materials specifically focused around case studies and "what can you do with Drupal?"

Kieran: I think it was internally very exciting to feel the strength of our community, and it gave us a great chance say "Hi!" to our many users

Dries: There was a lot of excitement surrounding Drupal at OSCON; including a presentation, a Drupal booth, a Drupal BOF and a 2-day off-site Drupal conference. I think that we succeeded in putting Drupal on the map of many OSCON attendees.

Dries: Furthermore, the Drupal community, and their presence at OSCON, is far more persuasive than any advertising campaign. The enthusiasm of some Drupal users is far more convincing than traditional marketing material (like leaflets), and just having these people present makes for an effective marketing campaign.

Boris: We even made friends with the Plone guys. They walked off with a "My CMS kicks your CMS’s ass" t-shirt! And we know now the international secret Plone handshake.

Boris: e.g. Rasmus (PHP Creator). Now we can hopefully look forward to more Drupal t-shirt sightings around the world.
Big points for anyone that gets a picture of Rasmus' wife in her Drupal t-shirt :-).

Robin: Also, Kieran, you sent back a little note saying that some corporations had also expressed a large amount of interest? Care to expand on that for our readers?

Kieran: A lot of traditional corporations are realizing they want to harness the loyalty they see in communities as well as reap the benefit of innovative ideas that communities can produce.
That does not occur naturally in a hierarchical customer service department. It's particularly painful for large corporations that are mission driven to acknowledge this.
It's organizations that had originally been mission driven and originated as grassroots efforts and for efficiency and ease of management they abandoned their volunteer and community efforts in favor of the efficiency of paid employees who could take advantage of the productivity of information technology.

Boris: I'd have to say that it's not just community.

Kieran: Boris, do you have examples?

Boris: Drupal has cutting edge features in its taxonomy and node systems, as well as aggregation features, that make it killer for mixing and matching lots of content -- competitive intelligence, knowledge management, blogosphere tracking, etc. etc.

Kieran: Providing these powerful tools to people and communities that were traditionally less powerful is very personally gratifying.

Robin: Do you feel OSCON will have a long term affect on Drupal?

Boris: It marks the second successful gathering of Drupal enthusiasts, and shows continued momentum. There was one independent gathering of Educational use of Drupal while we were there. And there is to be ongoing meetups in Portland, starting tomorrow (see DrupalED.org).

Kieran: Yes, it was a very important landmark for CivicSpace for two reasons
1) It was a homecoming of sorts, to be fully integrated and strategically aligned with Drupal once again. At an organization level but also a personal level with Boris and Dries
2) The working groups largely broke up into traditionally marketing segments: community journalism, politics, vendors, education. This validated CivicSpaces approach of targetting a distribution to specific communities.

Dries: Meeting developers makes it easy to discuss many topics in a short timeframe and to align ideas. Discussions that otherwise would have taken weeks, if not months. Meeting users is also important; because it helps you understand their needs. It helps you reflect on the state of Drupal, helps you define priorities.

Kieran: I think this showed that the Drupal community is maturing beyond just technology but addressing specific community issues and needs.

Robin: Dries, has anything like this happened previous to OSCON 2005?

Dries: Yes, we had an (unofficial) meeting in Vancouver (Canada) last year, and earlier this year we had our very first Drupal conference in
Antwerp (Belgium). About 20 people showed up in Vancouver and about 50 people showed up in Antwerp. Vancouver was more of an ad-hoc meeting but the Drupal conference in Antwerp was more like the Drupal conference in Portland. We piggy-backed on a well-known FOSS conference (FOSDEM) and added our own off-site, 2-day Drupal conference.

Boris: It was great to have local support in Portland. There seems to be a good base for future events. While OSCON was interesting and provided the ability to check out a lot of other projects, the full attendee costs were quite high.

Robin: So, overall, do you think OSCON was a marketing success for Drupal?

Boris: Yes!

Kieran: OSCON was a successful marketing activity, but not as much as a promotional marketing activity, but from a strategic marketing, and identification of market segments standpoint.

Dries: OSCON was a success, not just from a marketing point of view.

Kieran: What did the bloggers have to say about Drupal coming out of OSCON?

Boris: Big thing was Doug Kaye selecting it. That caused lots of other people to perk up their ears. But "bloggers" are diverging more and more from our core audience, since Drupal is overkill compared to a plain blog.

Kieran: Right.

Boris: BUT, when people grow out of "just blogging," they often pick
Drupal (e.g. events, recipes, movie reviews)

Robin: Are you all expecting similar results from Amsterdam?

Boris: No. In part because Euro OSCON is lower visibility than its US counterpart, so from general marketing, there will be less "buzz" unless Drupal has a big announcement (or a big site announces the use of Drupal).
However -- yes from the perspective of users and developers, since there is a very strong European core.

Kieran: For me, there are preset expectations going into Amsterdam. I want to see how much progress we make on the Drupal foundation, User Experience, and getting more developers.

Dries: I believe this is the first time OSCON is organized in Europe, so the conference is unlikely to have the same level of attendance and visibility as its USA counterpart which has been around for years.
Then again, FOSS is big in Europe so it's hard to predict. Either way, it makes for a great opportunity to meet with other Drupal users and developers. For me, the success and value of EuroOSCON depends on the attendance of the Drupal community, and to a lesser extent on the attendance of OSCON itself. To that extend, we already began to organize a number of free Drupal related events around EuroOSCON.

Robin: How will marketing be organized for similar (future) events like this? Is there some sort of marketing "plan"?

Kieran: I think we could move to preset common interests, less of a "get to know you" and more of a "let's get work done." For example, we saw Dries, Adrian, Jon, and James working on the forms API. We could see the same thing for education, for community journalism, etc.

Robin: There has been a lot of talk about a Drupal Foundation; will there be a Drupal Foundation?

Dries: at OSCON we had a Drupal Foundation meeting. Boris wrote about it.

Boris: And are working to get structures and community governance models in place, as well as exploring options whether we want to go our own way or connect with an umbrella organization like what Chris Messina is pursuing.
Lots of people are interested in seeing this happen and willing to be involved in the process

Dries: We want to explore our options before pushing this forward. For example, we've been talking to existing FOSS Foundations and will continue to approach more.

Robin: How will this affect further Drupal marketing and development?

Dries: One of the foundation's goals would be to manage the Drupal donations and assets. The Drupal Foundation could decide to fund
Drupal-related events by paying for booth space, organizing conferences, providing marketing material, Drupal swag, etc.

Boris: e.g. we had a free booth at OSCON, but had to pay for tables, chairs and carpet (we skipped the carpet); as well as printing costs for one pagers.

Robin: Finally, what are your largest expectations from Drupal 4.7?

Boris: For Drual's aggregator to be replaced with aggregator2 (feeds/items as nodes), support Atom.
Looking forward to the new infrastructure, which will let us put in place tools to help people self organize local Drupal and Drupal CoP meetings.

Dries: I hope that Drupal 4.7 will be more accessible to both users and developers. I hope that for users, Drupal 4.7 will offer a better out of the box experience thanks to the usability improvements and the new features. For developers, I hope that Drupal 4.7 will provide a solid and stable framework to extend and build custom applications on.

Kieran: For me, I think there are few things I'd like to see in 4.7
1) Drupal documentation being firmly tied between Drupal administration help and the handbook will lead to a stronger resource for helping administrators and users.
2) I think AJAX support will raise consciousness of interaction design and information architecture for Drupal developers.
3) I think we will see the robustness of Drupal contribution modules in Drupal 4.7 will make Drupal pull away as a community management tool and separate from other CMSs.

Robin: Thanks to everyone, you've all been great! Any last words?

Dries: We are the Drupal community. We rock. ;)

Drupal development quickies

Overall, Neil Drumm was sending small patches for various issues like no tomorrow. Thanks! To quote another developer "I like the devel list because I hear from drumm so much on it."

Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/

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Drupal tip

Upgrade (Contributed by Sthithaprajna Garapaty)
Upgrading is especially important this time because of the major
security fix. Failing to upgrade can result in someone cracking into your website and abusing it.
Even if it is not a security issue, it is a good idea to upgrade every time a stable version of Drupal is released. This way, you have the latest bug fixes and new features.
However, before you upgrade, be sure to backup your database and files
so that you can roll back in case of any unforeseen issues.

Play B-I-N-G-O! (Contributed by Angie Byron)
Want to help Drupal? Like random games of chance? Why not combine both of these interests in one fell swoop and participate in:
Patch Bingo
and
Bug Bingo
These links will take you to a random issue in the Drupal queue. Test out bugs to see if they're still an issue, try out patches to see if they work and comment on whether or not they'd be useful. You'll both add some wacky adventures to your life, and help Drupal at the same time!

E-commerce (Contributed by Sthithaprajna Garapaty)
Check out this nice ecommerce module for Drupal.
While I wouldn’t recommend it to start an entire store, it has everything you need to make your own little gift shop and sell t-shirts, coffee mugs and more.
Plus, it integrates nicely, so your store looks just like the rest of your website.

You can get more tips from Bryght’s “Best Practices” section.

Drupal sightings

We are always on the lookout for the Druplicon, and this month, we think we found some prime examples of Drupal’s flexibility, customizability and usability.

Lassiter 91
A school reunion site that shows off some of Drupal’s best community features.

Computerworld Cool Sites
Just another small step as we take over the world. Muwhahahaha.

New Hampshire Public Radio
A local community radio and events site that is using the power of Drupal to manage their entire online presence. Go Public Radio!

Connect for Kids
A wonderful example of how Drupal can be completely customized.

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