Attendees for the upcoming DrupalCon in Barcelona can get a T-Shirt as well as good conference at a nice place.

Since the previous status update, there have been a number of additional improvements, including:

1. Numerous installer improvements, including the ability to import translations for enabled modules automatically in the installer and the ability to specify numerous settings at install time (administrator (user number 1) credentials, clean URLs, timezone).
2. Automatically importing translation files for modules and themes, when installing modules or enabling themes, as well as when adding a new language.
3. Numerous usability improvements, including various installer improvements, the ability to remember anonymous comment posters, etc. It's great to see that the mega usability thread yielded some good patches.
4. The user status module and the HTML corrector module are now in core.
5. A vastly improved file management system, which associates files with users rather than nodes, so that files can be re-used among posts and various preview bugs are taken care of.
6. A completely reworked database abstraction layer for table creation. This makes it far easier to port Drupal to other database backends, such as Oracle and SQLite.
7. A JavaScript aggregator to complement the CSS aggregator feature in Drupal 5.
8. Right-to-left (RTL) CSS files for built-in modules, so themes supporting right-to-left displays can work easily with Drupal 6. RTL CSS support for some built-in themes is already done.

Due to the exciting developments in the past four weeks and the rapid pace that the developers are currently funneling in those improvements, I have decided to extend the code freeze until July 1, 2007. This way, the current waves of innovation won't be stifled, and it will help give us another four weeks to put in even more great improvements.

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The Drupal Association is working to set up a membership program. The goal is to design a open, fair, and effective way for individuals and companies to financially support the Drupal community directly and get benefits from the Drupal project in return. We are in the research phase now and could use your help. Please take five minutes to fill out the preceeding survey.

In 2006, Drupal.org traffic increased 250%. In order to prepare for future growth of Drupal.org and the needs of the Drupal community the Drupal Association is looking into starting a paid advertising program. We believe that paid advertising that is relevant to the needs of Drupal administrators, Drupal users, and the Drupal community can be placed in relevant sections of Drupal.org and help the Drupal community greatly by funding improvements and infrastructure for Drupal.org websites.

If you represent a company interested in participating please get in touch. We are looking for proposals from:

* Hosting companies that provide reliable, secure hosting of Drupal web sites.
* Web development and consulting companies and practioners which provide contributions back to the Drupal community.

Today the Knight Foundation awarded $12 million in grants to various individuals and organizations to help journalism continue moving into a digital future. We're pleased to announce a couple of Drupal connections associated with this excellent initiative.

Benjamin Melançon, Co-founder of Agaric Design Collective, and Google Summer of Code student for Drupal this year, received $15,000 towards the development of a "Related Items" module for Drupal. The focus of this module will be on ease of use in connecting two pieces of content, including the ability to determine how to automatically forge connections between nodes. You can also read Benjamin's original proposal.

Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger and long time citizen journalist pioneer with her Boston local h2otown website, received $220,000 towards further developing Placeblogger. Placeblogger was developed using Drupal's built in aggregation ability, and customized to integrate geo and location information. The goal is to make it easier for people to find local news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of “universal geotagging” in blogs. Bryght worked with Lisa to help make this site a success. Find out more in Williams' announcement on Placeblogger.com.

Drupal.org will have some scheduled downtime tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd of May, at 19:00 MEST (10am PDT, 1PM EDT, 17:00 UTC). We will be converting our database to use InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM in order to help with drupal.org performance. Since the drupal.org database is quite large, this can take a while. We hope to be back after three hours.

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