Year (2004) after year (2005), we have had a tradition on Drupal.org to look back at the last year and make predictions for the year ahead. Year (2006) after year (2007) we are amazed at how wrong we were trying to predict the future and how right we are making our own great future. Year after year, and 2008 was no exception. Take a look at the predictions for 2008 to see who was wrong and who was right, and post a comment in this thread to predict what will happen in the Drupal community for 2009.
As promised, we're organizing a series of sprints to help push the drupal.org redesign closer to completion. The drupal.org redesign is a massive project, and, when implemented, will be an important milestone for our community.
The Drupal.org website was originally launched in 2001 and last redesigned in 2005; over time we've simply outgrown it. The community has made it clear that new features were needed, and the Drupal Association has made the Drupal.org redesign one of its top priorities. By improving the navigation, the design and the organization of the site, we hope to further expand Drupal's reach and to provide us better tools to communicate and collaborate.
Most of you are likely familiar with the open redesign process that has occurred in the redesign group with the help from Mark Boulton, Leisa Reichelt and many other people in our community. Now it is time for us, the community, to take these designs and to implement them.
To that end, we're organizing a number of redesign-specific sprints over the next two months, each concentrating on a specific area of the process. Even though we won't be able to completely upgrade the entire site during these sprints, we will make valuable progress and form plans that will allow us to move forward to completion. Many Drupal contributors have already agreed to participate, and a number of companies and individuals have come forward to donate time, resources and money. I've included a Chip-in widget on this page, and I encourage you to contribute as well. Read on for the details.
Drupal 6.8 and Drupal 5.14 are slight updates to Drupal 6.7 and 5.13, removing an incompatibility with versions of PHP before 5.2 released in the earlier versions. The 6.7 and 5.13 releases fixed problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities.
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.
The deadline for submitting sessions proposals for DrupalCon DC is December 10. If you'd like to present but haven't yet submitted, please submit your session before midnight! So far, almost 150 session ideas have been submitted and discuss a variety of topics. It's exciting to have such a large and varied pool to select the final sessions from - and to know that we're well on our way to having a high quality conference.
The Drupal Association is excited to announce that the last iteration, iteration 11, of the Drupal.org redesign is now available for review. Hundreds of Drupal community members and designers have participated in the redesign of Drupal.org.
We have had over 450 comments on 10 posts in the Drupal.org redesign group. Leisa Reichelt, our user experience research lead, has posted over 26 blog entries about the Drupal.org redesign with over 300 comments! Over on Mark Boulton Design, Mark has blogged 6 posts with over 430 comments. Who knew that open source contributors were so passionate about fonts, logos, and brands? Mark Boulton has also blogged three posts on his personal blog. It's been an exciting, educational, and insightful process for everyone who has been involved. If you haven't had a chance to review these 42 blog posts, or the numerous posts about the redesign on Planet Drupal, please take a few hours and get involved now!
Crooks and Liars is an American liberal blog, which was founded in August of 2004, during the 2004 Presidential election, by John Amato. It was the first video style blog around, starting in a pre-YouTube era. Crooks and Liars has a team of about a dozen volunteers, including administrators, contributors and moderators. Crooks and Liars has grown immensely since its birth, now averaging over 230,000 unique visitors per day and over 330,000 page impressions.
Evolution
Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.
As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.