git.drupal.org, drupal.org and our sub-sites have a scheduled maintenance window on Tuesday November 15th from 5PM PST to 7PM PST (UTC-8). Note that this is not a downtime window for drupal.org, but a period of possible instability. git.drupal.org and git.drupalcode.org will have an actual downtime during this window. Watch drupal_infra on Twitter for real-time status updates.

This maintenance window is to re-rack and re-VLAN our servers. Thank you for your patience.

Klaus Purer is a member of the Drupal community who has been recently been extremely active with project applications. How active? In the last 30 days he has commented on almost twice as many projects as the next most prolific commenter. Even though he just got involved in the last month, he's tied for most reviews of the most projects in the last 6 months!

Earlier this year the Drupal Association began a process to elect and build a new board. In July a call for nominations was made and the community responded with over 50 submissions. The nomination committee spent many weeks reviewing the nominations, following up with potential candidates, until finally submitting a slate of nominees, which was confirmed by the board.

Drupal 7.9, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Several critical bugs with the OpenID have been addressed in this release, among other critical and major bugs, and a few new API features. See the Drupal 7.9 release notes for a full listing.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Session proposals are still being accepted for the next DrupalCon, being held at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, March 19 -23, 2012. The conference theme is "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device" and the deadline to submit sessions is October 26, 2011 23:59:59 UTC/GMT -7.

DrupalCon Denver will be focusing on 8 significant areas of expertise and of particular interest to Drupal users and developers alike. Preference will be given to session ideas that examine the following tracks and how they relate to the conference theme:

It is with great excitement that I can announce "subscribe" comments on Drupal.org issues are now dead! Long live issue following! Issue e-mail notifications are also improved.

Almost exactly 6 years after #34496: [meta] Add Flag module to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe without posting a comment was originally posted, this feature is finally done and deployed on Drupal.org. If you notice any problems, please go to #1306554: QA for issue following on Drupal.org and comment there.

Summary of changes

In the past, you had to comment on an issue in order to keep track of it, commonly done by posting "subscribe" (or variations thereof). Popular issues gained plenty of such comments, making it hard for contributors to distill the important and useful information in an issue.

You are now able to "follow" issues by clicking a button, without commenting on them. You can also "unfollow" issues, even ones you had to comment on but you are not really interested in. Lastly, you can now configure for which projects and issues you want to get e-mail notifications.

Sponsors

First, I'd like to thank the sponsors that made this possible:

The 88 members of the community that contributed to the 2 chip-ins to raise a total of $2777.27 towards the original goal of $7,000.