The San Francisco Drupal community is pleased to invite everyone to register for DrupalCon San Francisco to be held at the world-famous Moscone Center April 19th to 21st, 2010. Tickets are currently $195, but may increase in price. Register early to guarantee your place at the premier event of the Drupal community and experience firsthand its energy and momentum. This event is the best place to learn about Drupal 7 and the future of Drupal into 2010 and beyond.

DrupalCon San Francisco will feature three full days of sessions from the best and brightest in the Drupal community and Silicon Valley luminaries. The weekend before the conference we will also be hosting a Core Developer Summit (4/17), a Drupal Sprint and BOF Day (4/18), and professional Drupal training sessions (4/18). The traditional Code Sprint will happen the day after the conference (4/22). More details about the conference events and logistics can be found at http://sf2010.drupal.org.

San Francisco is a world-class city full of wonderful cuisine and culture. As home to Silicon Valley, it is one of the most technologically vibrant areas in the world. There are a lot of interesting things going on here and it is our pleasure to share our city with you and to invite everyone to attend DrupalCon San Francisco next April 19th to 21st, 2010.

Drupal 6.15 and 5.21, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as non critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

CrowdedText.com is a site where businesses and other customers can create writing contests for their creative and content needs. Writers then compete in these contests, uploading their entries, and getting paid if selected as a winner.

In order to create a contest, the customer fills out a multi-step form, selecting contest type, filling out requirements and prize to award, selecting any upgrades, and finally checking out and paying the corresponding fees. The customer can manage their contests by voting on entries, sorting entries, and sending private messages to writers. They can award an entry at any time.

CrowdedText.com was built in Drupal 6. The entire process was managed and implemented by PropDrop.

Berliner.de is a social network focused on Berlin. Berliner.de is for all Berliners and all other citizens of the world who are mad for Berlin or are eager to become so. On Berliner.de, users are able to add new content or comment and rate other people's contributions. They can make new friends, upload pictures, send messages, subscribe to interesting topics or just stroll around the vast amount of existing bits and pieces regarding Berlin on the site. The most important things going on in a user's network are presented in a newsfeed.

The users are backed up by an editorial department that is checking, finalizing and publishing all public contributions.

Berliner.de was developed by the long-established company BerlinOnline that runs (among other portals) Berlin.de, the official website of Germany’s capital, Berlin. Involved in the development of Berliner.de were (among others) Drupal community members fl3a and ambo.

The core technical bae of Berliner.de is built on Drupal 6 using many additional modules. These include the obligatory CCK, Views, ImageCache, Pathauto and Rules.

Update: See Distribution packaging now fully supported on Drupal.org for details of new functionality.

3281d Consulting is very pleased to announce that a new era on drupal.org has begun: Drupal distributions (also known as "installation profiles") can now be automatically packaged with Drupal core and all of their required dependencies. When you download the distribution, you just unpack it into a web root directory, visit install.php, and you're done. This should vastly lower the barriers to getting a new Drupal site up and running. Please read on if you've ever considered installing a Drupal distribution or if you maintain one on drupal.org.

If you maintain an installation profile, be sure to read the How to package a profile on drupal.org handbook page before you try to use the new system.