Starting the new year off with a bang, the Drupal development team is pleased to announce that the third Drupal 4.7.0 beta release is available for immediate download at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-beta3.tar.gz! This beta release marks an important step towards the final Drupal 4.7.0 release and significant progress from our previous beta release: we've fixed over 100 bugs since the last beta release and more than 150 bugs since the first beta release. Here is the changelog. However, there are more bugs to be found, reported, and fixed before Drupal 4.7.0 can be released. The good news is that you can help!

We're doing things a bit different this time around. Goodstorm will be printing the t-shirts, and you'll order and pay through them.

The Drupal meetup last night was a huge success. At least 36 people attended at the new CivicSpace Labs/GoodStorm offices on the San Francisco Bay. Many people showed up looking to meet someone who actually knew what Drupal was. Others just wanted to let out their pent up Drupalness.

Please help us better coordinate the DrupalCon portion of the conference by signing up for sessions! Read on for more details...

The afternoon portions of the conference will CMS-specific, and we've got quite a few drupal-specific session topics for you to choose from! I'd like to encourage you to take just a few minutes and indicate which sessions you'll likely attend by visiting our signup site, http://scratch.blkmtn.org , logging in w/ YOUR_DRUPAL.ORG_USERNAME@drupal.org and your drupal.org password (you can also create a new account on that site if you prefer, but logging in via distributed authentication will let you right in), browsing the available sessions, and signing up for those which you will likely attend.

Signing up is easy: Just below the description of a session, you'll see a small form--enter your email address and any comments/suggestions you have for the session moderator, and click 'Sign up'. That's it!

Here's a few important things to remember about the process:

An often raised question on drupal.org is, "when will release x.y be done?". And most often the first answer received will be "It is done when it is done." Or it is just as likely the answer will be phrased in a somewhat less friendly manner: "When is the last time you patched a bug or tested a patch?". While one of these is a question, both qualify as good answers to the question "when willl it be done?". This is because software development in the Open Source differs in some important points to traditional software development. In this posting you can read what the difference is and how you can make, be, that difference.

Uwe Hermann has written a comprehensive article in the current issue of PHP Solutions, German edition Ausgabe 1 2006 (13). Uwe walks his readers through installing Drupal, and considers topics like multisite setups from the very beginning. He pays careful attention to describing how one would create a portal site (music portal in his article), where the site would be accessed using different subdomains, such as rock.example.com, blues.example.com and classical.example.com. This includes using database prefixing, and Uwe provides assistance on using the database prefixing scripts which ship with Drupal.