I'd like to freeze the development version of Drupal on August 15 in preparation of the Drupal 4.5.0 release. When the code freeze is in effect, only bug fixes, documentation updates and small usability or performance improvements will be accepted. All in all, this means we have about 1.5 months left to get all kind of improvements into core. This probably marks a good time to start wrapping up your custom changes and to make them available for inclusion in core.

A summary for the Drupal community

Let me place the conclusion at the top: Despite the fact that I did not manage to get Drupal t-shirts and that the Drupal poster wasn't printed the way I expected it, LinuxTag was a success for the Drupal project and a very interesting experience for myself.

Next week, I'll be presenting with three others on Drupal at the 2004
Computers and Writing Conference. My part will be to present an introduction
to Drupal and provide pre-configured versions of Drupal for the computers and
writing field, those teachers in English most concerned with the theory and
practice of writing with computers, electronic discourse, and the use of computers
in the classroom. It is my hope that by seriously reducing the learning curve
necessary to get a Drupal site up and running, Drupal will be more inviting
to the members of this discipline, and, indeed, other teachers and users as
well.

Thus, DrupalEd is a pre-configured Drupal install intended for an online writing
environment based upon my and others' experience teaching with Drupal this
past year. DrupalBlog is a general blog configuration of Drupal that I have
been using on my weblog and installing for others. Each contains Drupal 4.4.1
core and contributed modules without changes by me, except for the addition
of numerous Xtemplate skins (available
for download all together as a separate package). Each also contains a detailed
configuration guide that provides some basic instructions on initial site configuration.
The guides are built into the site within the collaborative book and included
in the distribution itself as a pdf. The install process is the same as for
Drupal with my database dumps and collections of files. However, the site uses
clean URL's, requiring that Apache mod_rewrite must be available to the .htaccess
file.

A few weeks ago I started capturing some notes about areas of Drupal where I think we can make some usability improvements. You can see the notes I've captured so far on my wiki. I've been focussing on issues I encounter as I use Drupal, with the idea in the back of my mind that I should look for problems mainly with the core Drupal installation based on heuristics.

On May 13, Movable
Type announced that with version 3.0 they would be "Getting Their Pricing
Right." The new licensing scheme--which only makes MT available for free
for 1 author and up to 3 websites--is, as Mark
Pilgrim has pointed out, a demonstration that "free enough" does
not guarantee any freedoms in the long term. And so many current MT users are
now searching for copyleft and/or open source blogging software alternatives.

Dan Gillmor wrote about CivicSpace Labs where Zack and I do our work on Drupal. It is a good summary of what we are doing organizationally. Drupal is even mentioned specifically towards the end.