From the user conference aka DrupalCon Part 1 at Portland State University on Tuesday August 2nd and the free Drupal BOF at OSCON on August 4th, I learned that it's all about the people. Drupal has awesome technology but the biggest challenge going forward in my opinion is harnessing that technology to meet people's needs and making people aware of how they can use that technology.

In preparation of the Drupal 4.7.0 release, development of Drupal core will be frozen on September 1st. As of September 1st, the focus is to strengthen the code base's performance, usability and stability. As we progress, focus will shift towards stability and near the end of the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed, until no release critical bugs are left. After the code freeze, it will take several weeks before Drupal 4.7.0 can be released, however, one or more release candidates will be made available during the code freeze.

Read on for more information about the current status of the forthcoming Drupal 4.7 release.

We had our first face-to-face meeting on Friday regarding the formation of a foundation to support the further growth of Drupal. Creating a foundation is a major undertaking, and requires a lot of work and organization to pull everything together. Some of the most important aspects are to look at the needs and goals of such a foundation, and specifically how it can serve the Drupal community as a whole.

Welcome once again to the Drupal Newsletter! You’ll be happy to know we haven’t had to cut back for the summer (although the heat has made us slightly slower ;-) ).
The important news this month is our large scale outage lasting over 3 days which caused a severe disruption in the Drupal services. We are happy to say we are back on track now, and with even more services on the horizon!
It appears our downtime was a blessing in disguise. We raised over $10,000 USD in addition to in-kind donations of services and servers, and we set up a long term hosting plan for Drupal.org with OSL!
All of us at Drupal want to give our heart-felt thanks to those in the community who took it upon themselves to donate. Your donations will keep Drupal happily hosted for the foreseeable future.
Of course, Drupal has had lots of smaller announcements this month, including a restyled handbook, a wedding announcement, a security release and a Drupal UK meetup.
In all the summer rush, don’t forget to contribute to the Drupal Newsletter! Your contributions keep the Drupal Newsletter fresh and exciting, all year long!
There’s a lot to catch up on this month, and it all starts...right now.

You do not need programming skills, just a fair amount of Drupal experience and some time. There are a large number of older bug reports marked CVS that have not been closed out over time ago and may no longer be relevant. Here are the steps:

1. Download and install Drupal HEAD on a test site.
2. Visit the pending bugs list and start with the oldest reports.
3. If a bug is marked as 4.5 or cvs, check if it still applies to the current HEAD version you downloaded.
   • if it still applies, then set the version to cvs (if there is more than one cvs in the version menu, pick the first)
   • Click the follow up link and update the bug report with your findings so that work is not duplicated.
   • if the bug can no longer be reproduced as it is fixed or just no longer applies (several screens are reworked in HEAD), just change the status to fixed and update the comments acordingly.
4. If bug report version is marked as 4.6, then just follow up whether the bug still exists in HEAD and update accordingly with a comment "exists in current HEAD". If you feel like verifiying if the bug has been corrected in 4.6.2 then go ahead but the current focus is to clean up the oldest ones first.

There has been a surge of interest lately to try and create Drupal-driven artist and music websites. I know many members of the Drupal community have been frustrated in trying to leverage Drupal for art and music websites because:

1. Artists and musicians don't understand how Drupal could help them
2. The learning curve for Drupal is too high
3. Developers can't find other developers who are interested in using Drupal to create artist and music websites
4. Information overload on drupal.org

As a result, I've launched a website to address the problems above: http://www.drupalART.org/.