We'll be having our 3rd DC Drupal meetup this Thurs, 5-7pm at Murky Coffeehouse. To change things up a bit, I'm going to go over Drupal and theming, and give examples of sites that don't look like a Drupal install, along with showing the underlying code on how to achieve similar results (it's easier than you think!). If anyone wants to help co-pilot this talk, let me know. After this 30 min talk, we can break into our usual groups and just talk Drupal.

Currently we are running the third Release Candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of Drupal. This means that our new release is just around the corner now and while we can’t put a date on when this much anticipated version will ship, it will be within weeks instead of months. So it is a bit late to start coordinating a marketing offensive to go with the release, however, it is never too late to market a product or service. In this thread you can post what you want to contribute to the marketing offensive.

Welcome to Spring! Welcome to warmer days, green grass, BBQ season, days at the beach, picnics and Drupal 4.7. Yup, that's right Drupal 4.7. Now, before you go scouring for a link to the tarballs, let me warn you, there are none, yet. (for those of you on the opposite side of the globe, who will soon be up to your ears in snow, we sympathize, we're just beginning to feel our ears again up here :) ).

Thanks to the feverish work of many Drupal developers Drupal 4.7 should be released shortly, and all the hyped-about features, the AJAX, the better caching; all that Drupalistic goodness, will be yours.

In the Dev Zone of this issue (yeah, we changed section names again...) Karoly (aka. chx) has outlined his list of the top new developers who made this release possible, but this is no where near a complete list. On behalf of the Drupal community we thank every person who gave a line of code or a good suggestion, filed a bug report or said a kind word to the developers. Without you, well, there probably wouldn't be a 4.7.

I'd also like to thank all those that responded to the Drupal.org frontpage post asking for articles and personal experiences; thanks to the great response we have enough articles to begin on our next issue as well! As always, we still want to hear from you. Drop us a line at the official contact form. Read on for the complete Drupal Newsletter!

The Drupal team has released the third release candidate of Drupal 4.7. Several new critical issues came up since RC2, but were quickly fixed. We also took advantage of the extended development time to get some more last-minute usability improvements in.

However, don't let this news of critical issues scare you. Drupal.org has been purring happily along on the 4.7 development branch for 3 weeks now without issues, showing that 4.7.x is a mature branch which has definitely left behind its growing pains. It's notable that today it's been exactly one year since Drupal 4.6.0 was released. This is almost double our normal release time and we will definitely talk more about this extended development after the final release. We definitely want to avoid such long delays in the future.

Again we invite you to help us test this latest release candidate, so that Drupal 4.7.0 final can be out soon. Drupal 4.7 RC3 can be downloaded at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-rc3.tar.gz.

Updated!

I am very happy to announce that an invitation from Google arrived today asking if Drupal would like to participate in Summer of Code 2006. Drupal's involvement in SoC 2005 was a smashing success bringing code, money and fresh faces to the Drupal project. Being given the opportunity to repeat and build upon last year's experience is a dream.

This year I would like to see more discussion beforehand on the types of projects that would be most beneficial to Drupal for students to work on. We learned last year that about half of the applicants will latch onto ideas that we provide and half will propose exciting ideas that we never thought of. Use this thread to discuss potential projects and I'll organize and pursue the most promising ideas on separate pages later when students begin applying. See below for instructions

Last year also showed that there is never too much support from mentors. I'm not joking when I say I would like to see two mentors per student. Please contact me directly if you would like to be a mentor.

Now is the time to start reaching out to college students who might be considering getting involved in open source development and encouraging them to apply to SoC, and specifically to the Drupal project. Students are encouraged to plan their applications carefully and really invest time and energy into preparing them. The competition will be fierce and an application must really stand out to catch our attention. The rewards, however, are great. Some of the students from last year are now working full time as Drupal programmers and consultants.

The 10th episode of Lullabot's Drupal Podcast has just been posted. Past podcasts have included interviews with Earl Miles (Views module), Moshe Weitzman (Organic Groups), and Steven Wittens (Drupal), as well as several "Intro to Drupal" shows and ongoing Drupal news, tips, tricks, and answers to listener questions. Podcasts are posted (almost) weekly and we've got more on the way.