Only about eight weeks remain until DrupalCon Chicago; if you haven't bought your ticket yet, now is the time to do so! The Early Bird Registration rate of $350 is still available, but not for long. Starting January 15, ticket prices will increase to $400, so act now and save!

DrupalCon Chicago will feature more than 85 confirmed sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond. Don’t miss out on live keynotes from Dries Buytaert, Clay Shirky, and Jared Spool, and a wealth of content that will be offered via pre-conference training sessions, the exhibit hall Day Stage, Birds of a Feather sessions, Core Conversations, sprints, and more.

On January 7, thousands of Drupal community members around the world will gather together to celebrate the release of Drupal 7. This is an incredible event for the entire community, and we want to help you be a part of bringing the community together to celebrate! To that end, we have put together a guide to help your share your celebrations.

The DrupalCon Chicago organizing committee is pleased to announce the selection sessions from proposals submitted by the Drupal community. Drawn from nearly 350 publicly-submitted session proposals, these sessions represent the full breadth and depth of the community’s knowledge and expertise.

While the sessions announced today represent the bulk of the session program, some additional sessions will be added over the coming week. The complete and finalized session schedule will be announced in mid-January, 2011. DrupalCon Chicago will be held March 7-10, 2011.

Friends of Ed, a division of Apress, has published "Foundation Drupal 7: Learn how to use the Drupal framework to quickly build feature-rich web sites" by R.J. Townsend, with a chapter on the Fusion theme by Stephanie Pakrul (aka StephTheGeek).

We are proud to present to you the fourth (and likely final) release candidate of Drupal 7.0. This is a bug fix release for some critical upgrade path issues.

1. We're back down to 0 critical issues again!
2. We've announced a January 5 release date for Drupal 7!
3. There are release parties being thrown worldwide on January 7. Please set one up in your town! (tips)

So. It's officially GO time for final testing!

Since the last release candidate a week ago, we have fixed numerous bugs, including bugs with PostgreSQL and a critical issue with the password upgrade path which corrupts password hashes. Affected sites' users will need to reset passwords after their second log-in. Sorry about that!

For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

There are a number of modules already ported to Drupal 7 for your testing pleasure. You can keep tabs on whether or not your site is ready for Drupal 7 by using the Upgrade Status module. If you are a translator, now is the time to start working on your translations. If you are a module or theme maintainer, now is the time to start working on the update to Drupal 7! Read on for more details.