We have some changes to announce relative to Drupal's documentation team.

Firstly, I'd like to thank Addison Berry (add1sun) for her two years of service as the Drupal documentation lead. She has done a great job of coaching documentation contributors and developing a vision for Drupal's documentation during her time as the lead. Addison has recently decided it was time to step down from this role, and I am pleased to be able to have her pass the torch onto a pair of keen documentation contributors.

I've appointed Ariane Khachatourians (arianek) and Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) as the new documentation co-leads. Ariane will be taking the primary responsibility for the Drupal documentation, and Jennifer will be taking primary responsibility for the Drupal API documentation. They will also be working together to strengthen and build the Drupal documentation team, drive the direction and strategy for documentation projects, communicate the priorities and status of the documentation effort to the greater community, and organize documentation sprints.

Ariane Khachatourians (arianek) is a tireless contributor and maintainer of the Drupal.org documentation. She's the single most active person in setting the direction for the Documentation, and by far one of the biggest contributors. Take a look at her tracker to see where she's been lately.

She is...

• Co-Lead for the Drupal Docs Team
• Admin for the Vancouver User Group and Drupalchix
• Hugely involved in the Drupal core issue queue and was at one point the 27th highest D7 patch contributor

And to top it off, a really nice person who just keeps working to make Drupaldom a better and happier place. And who is succeeding at that.

Today marks reaching Drupal 7's 0 critical bug milestone! We've rolled one final beta release to shake out any last minute problems and fix strings. Please help!

This release includes:

• Upgrade to jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery UI 1.8.6
• Numerous upgrade path fixes
• Numerous accessibility fixes
• All critical bugs fixed!

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

Hey, wait! But there are 0 criticals! Why another beta?!

As of today, Drupal 7's critical issue queue has reached 0. A huge thanks to the tremendous effort of hundreds of people who have helped bring us to this momentous milestone!

By traditional definition, we should be entering release candidate phase. However, while we have been focused on smashing criticals, we have accumulated a "major" issue queue that's currently 5 pages long, and have been neglecting to prepare for string freeze, which happens at RC1.

So, Dries and I felt that it was appropriate to have one last chance to take a final pass through the issue queue and find any straggler release blockers that might still be buried, and to identify and fix issues that impact string freeze (anything that changes something wrapped within the t() function).

From Here to RC

So. If you're in MAINTAINERS.txt, or otherwise knowledgeable about the issues in the core queue, we urgently need your help in taking one last look at your queues over the next day or two and making sure there aren't any remaining critical issues buried in the "major" list.

Because Drupal is by definition release-ready right now, we are going to strictly timebox the following:

• Maintainers have until 11:59 PM Pacific US Time Wednesday, November 17 (07:59 AM UTC) to dig up critical issues from their majors queue. Move them from "major" to "critical" so that we can discuss. (Note that these will have to pass an extremely high bar; we've had almost 3 years to identify such issues.)
• While going through your queues, if you find issues that impact string freeze, please tag them "string freeze."
• I want to roll RC1 to no later than November 30, 2010 (with the caveat of any new security/data loss issues will block the release if still active at that time). Ideally, we do RC1 even earlier (Dries's birthday is November 19, or failing that, US Thanksgiving represents a GREAT time for many of you to get away from your family and work on Drupal :)).

To be clear, once RC1 happens:

- All strings are frozen.
- All markup is frozen.
- The UI is frozen.
- The API is frozen.
- The theme system is frozen.
- Drupal 7.0's release is imminent.

So please, help do your part to get Drupal 7 DONE!

(What follows is the standard "how to test this alpha/beta release" spiel.)

The Drupal Association and the European Drupal community are pleased to announce that DrupalCon Europe will be hosted in the United Kingdom in 2011. We are inviting engaging speakers and are planning over 75 sessions that appeal to everyone from beginners to top level developers, designers and architects. This is the perfect opportunity to network, gain new skills and share your passion for Drupal. Please support this great event.

Government bodies and companies face the challenge of creating websites that are optimally accessible to people as well as browsers and search engines. There are internationally recognized agreements for creating accessible websites like WCAG. The Dutch government has assembled these international standards in a quality model called the Web Guidelines. This quality model mandates significantly better websites that are made for all people.

Before the end of 2010, all Dutch governmental websites must comply with this set of guidelines. The symbol on the left is the certificate displayed by sites that validate to all 125 guidelines. Recently, the ICTU, an institution founded by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations that helps authorities to improve their ICT performance, decided to relaunch the Web Guidelines website using Drupal. The information on the new site (www.webrichtlijnen.nl / www.webguidelines.nl) is tailored to specific target audiences and the phases of an implementation. A developer or editor can now view the guidelines that are most relevant to him or her. The new site features case studies, best practices and success stories. It also offers a tool that can automatically check if a website conforms to 47 of the 125 guidelines.

We are happy to announce that registration is now open for DrupalCon Chicago, which will be held March 7-10, 2011 at the Drupal Tower in downtown Chicago! You can sign up and purchase your ticket today at http://chicago2011.drupal.org/

DrupalCon Chicago will feature dozens of curated sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond, as well as countless opportunities for networking, code sprints, conversations, and more.

The conference will be held at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, located in downtown Chicago. During DrupalCon, the Sheraton will become the Drupal Tower, your one-stop location for all conference activities and accommodations.

When you register, you'll have the opportunity to purchase your event ticket, reserve your hotel room in the Drupal Tower, and sign up for pre-conference training sessions as well as the official March 8 after-party at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History! If you already have a drupal.org user account, you can use it to automatically sign in to the DrupalCon website.

We're also pleased to announce our open invitation for speakers at DrupalCon Chicago. This is your opportunity to share your knowledge with DrupalCon attendees. Find out more at http://chicago2011.drupal.org/speaker-application

Sessions that have been confirmed so far include speakers on design and user experience, coding and development, implementation and configuration, theming, business and strategy, and the Drupal community.

In addition to the regular session programming, DrupalCon Chicago will also feature keynotes by Dries Buytaert, Clay Shirky, and Jared Spool. As some of the leading minds in today’s ever-expanding new media landscape, these speakers will inform, engage, and inspire DrupalCon attendees.

DrupalCon Chicago will also include a number of events new to DrupalCon, including a Day Stage, the Drupal Means Business track, and Core Conversations, in addition to the traditional after-conference sprints.

Those interested in helping sponsor DrupalCon Chicago can download a copy of our sponsor prospectus, but don't delay as sponsorship slots are limited and going fast!

You can keep up-to-date with the latest information about DrupalCon Chicago by going to http://chicago2011.drupal.org/ or following us on Twitter @drupalcon