Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is Packt's new book, written by Michael Peacock, aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. With more and more websites aiming to integrate all of their components to give a more slick and streamlined effect for users - by using Drupal e-Commerce, the site and the store are already integrated providing both a powerful website and a powerful online store.

The Horizon Interactive Awards winners were announced over the past weekend. Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Several Drupal-powered sites, developed by studio:module and pingVision were among the winners.

Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.

Many of the projects this year build on work done during previous Summer of Codes. Drupal core will benefit from a new aggregator, improved search scoring, OpenID attribute exchange, revamped help system and color module, SimpleTest security scanner and generalized Validation API. There are also projects focused on improvements to the Drupal.org infrastructure, including ApacheSolr search, version control API, and the much demanded plugin manager for secure, automated updating of module and themes.

Some of Drupal's major contributed modules will also gain, including Views as widgets, Views RDF/XML/JSON output, Views & CCK chart support, extensions to Nodequeue and OAuth support for Services.

There's also a healthy component of brand new functionality, including an image manipulation GUI, memetracker, bookings API, Icon module, document import module and Usability testing suite.

If you'd like to keep up on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2008 working group and help out in whatever ways you can. Also check out Planet SoC to read blog entries from Summer of Code students across all mentoring organizations.

Here's to another great summer! :) Read on to find more details about Drupal's accepted proposals.

The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.
--Dries Buytaert, in Businessweek

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Also among the top innovators are Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, Joe Green of Causes, Drew Houston of Dropbox, David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, and others.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.