In case you haven't heard yet, the fine folks from the Toronto Drupal User Group are putting on the second annual Drupal Camp Toronto. We've already had several great sponsors, speakers and attendees come forward and sign up - but we're looking for more! The dates are fast approaching, but we still have some spaces available.

Apress, publisher of Pro Drupal Development and Building Online Communities

After The World using Drupal there is another site that is contributing to the unofficial goal of Drupal ("World Domination"); Die Welt using Drupal!

Die Welt (German for "The World") is a quality daily newspaper from Axel Springer, the largest publisher in Europe. They recently launched their new website (www.welt.de) and this week also launched an additional "sidekick site", a community portal where people can interact and debate with each other and journalists hence named debatte.welt.de. This last site is a Drupal site.

We had a short interview with the project lead of Welt Christian Ruhnau about why he had chosen Drupal and his experience with implementing Drupal in one of the largest quality newspapers of Europe.

When I unveiled the Drupal-powered version of my webcomic to the world, I was proud of what I'd done -- legitimately so, I think. A ten-year-old webcomic, with ten years worth of comic archives, completely converted over to a database-driven site is nothing to sneeze at.

Unfortunately, this pride was short lived: after three days up, my site host provider suspended my account because I was getting too much traffic (thanks, in part, to a link from Drupal's front page) and it was killing the server it was on. They moved me to a test server for about a week, where they monitored how much site resources my site was using... after that week they reported that ubersoft.net had been consuming a full 4% of the site resources, and consquently I'd need to move up, at the very least, to a virtual host provider package.

I had neither the time nor the finances to do this, so I sadly moved back to my static pages. The Drupal version of the site is currently sitting in my test area, while I try to figure out how to redesign it so it can minimize the consumption of site resources.

Since reverting back to the static pages I've been trying to figure out what specifically caused the site to go down. At this point, I think I can point to the following areas:

1. Inaccurate reporting of site hosting capabilities on the part of the provider, and a lack of tools to accurately allow customers to measure site resource usage.

2. Database activity from Drupal on top of standard site resource consumption.

A more complete analysis follows.

DrupalEd is now available for download! The full announcement is available here --

In distributing this version, we opted to distribute the site as a tarball with all relevant code and third-party libraries. Down the road, we'd like to figure out a way around this, but given that both TinyMCE and the audio module require LGPL'd libraries that can't be hosted on d.o, AND that many people in education are working through software issues without a great deal of tech support, we figured a tarball with all the necessary code would lower the barrier to entry sigificantly. However, we would like to move away from this in the medium-to-long term -- we'd love to hear some ideas on ways around this .

This version bundles some useful functionality, and it is by no means done -- the biggest short-term priority is to build out an install profile, but we'll be writing up some more comprehensive notes over the next week.

After over a year of research and writing, Pro Drupal Development is now shipping. Written by core developers John VanDyk and Matt Westgate, the book is intended to help new developers climb up the Drupal learning curve quickly.

The book covers Drupal 5, from creating a basic module to in-depth documentation of the menu system and form API. Many heavy hitters in the Drupal community contributed to the book by reviewing drafts and offering suggestions and improvements. Among them were Károly Négyesi, Steven Wittens, Angela Byron, Heine Deelstra, John Resig, Ted Serbinski, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, Gábor Hojtsy, and Neil Drumm. In addition to reviewing chapters, Dries wrote the foreword.

Please note that if you decide to purchase the book, please do so from the "Buy" tab on http://www.drupalbook.com/ ... the Drupal Association will receive a small portion of the sale.

Here is the table of contents: