The Drupal Association has received a $5,800 donation from Drupal consulting company Lullabot. This donation comes from the profits of the Performance and Scalability seminar that was held as a fundraiser on March 24, 2007, following the Open Source CMS Summit at Yahoo! campus.

The seminar was co-presented by a panel consisting of Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, James Walker of Bryght, Jeremy Andrews of CivicSpace, and Matt Westgate and Robert Douglass of Lullabot. The panel spent the day evaluating the role each part of the software stack plays in performance and scalability, and imparting each person's experience to the attendees. The presentation slides from this event are available from http://www.lullabot.com/articles/performance_and_scalability_seminar_slides.

In addition to providing this donation to the Drupal Association, the funds raised by the seminar also paid for a Drupal "hackfest" the following day. In this face-to-face environment, Drupal developers were able to lay substantial groundwork for many important improvements to Drupal, including further revamps to the core menu system, and extending content type building functionality (CCK).

I'm happy to announce that as of today, there will be a new core committer: Gábor Hojtsy. Gábor will be a co-maintainer of the DRUPAL-6 branch (the next Drupal version after Drupal 5.x).

I have had a great deal of interest from various non-profits asking about the use of Drupal for their Enterprise applications. So, I thought a site list of what non-profits have done with Drupal would be a great way to sell the concept.

Here is my start:

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 20 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2007. The students, their projects, and the mentors for each are listed below. As the summer progresses, these students will be turning to the community for support and for help testing their work. To keep up-to-date with all of the latest SoC developments, please join the SoC 2007 working group and help out in whatever ways you can.

The projects this year show a strong focus on the core Drupal software and the infrastructure that makes Drupal.org run. For example, the translation, metrics, and RCS abstraction projects all intend to make project management on Drupal.org better in some way. The two core theme projects will help make Drupal a prettier and flashier looking software, and the search project will help make finding things with Drupal a bit easier.

A few of us made it out to the OSCMS conference last month and are excited to share some exciting Drupal developments, learn what everyone is working on, and try out our own "Drupal lightening talks." This Wednesday's meetup will consist of a series of five minute brain dumps (kind of like speed dating) and beer. We'll meet around 7:00 pm at Cafe Luna at 1633 P Street NW. Michelle Balsley from Trellon came up with the new venue for this month - it should be bigger, which will be nice since we've grown a bit.

Anyone can present - the only two rules are that you must talk about Drupal and your presentation must be shorter than five minutes. Post your ideas here of what you want to present and what you're interested in hearing about. Hopefully we'll have about five or six different presentations. We'll start the presentations around 7:30 pm and then get back to just drinking around 8:00 pm. Post ideas on groups.drupal.org/node/3453

If you're in town for the NTC conference and want to join us, the bar is just a five minute walk from the Dupont Circle metro on the red line.