Packt has today announced details of Matt Butcher’s new Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery book, which is scheduled for release in December. The book is being released as Packt’s first RAW (Read as we Write) book, which are designed as the most immediate and cutting-edge way to buy a Packt book. Generally available 4-6 months before the book is published, buying a RAW book gives you the opportunity to gain immediate access to content and share in the editorial process of producing a book.

A RAW version of a Packt book is just that; an unedited and unpolished version of the final product. As soon as the author has written a new chapter, Packt will add it to the eBook and notify customers who can download it immediately.

After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

The Knight Drupal Initiative which funds new and existing Drupal projects. The next monthly review meeting takes place on Thursday, 2 October 2008 at 15:00 EDT (19:00 UTC). The meeting will be held in IRC #drupal-dojo on irc.freenode.net. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information about using IRC.) We will meet for an hour and a half to review current proposals, discuss the application process and introduce new proposals to the community.

Community members are encouraged to review and comment on the existing proposals before the meeting.

A new top-level handbook will be added to Drupal.org this weekend, September 27-28, titled "Getting Involved." It will appear on the main Documentation landing page. We first posted about the new book back in August and have been working hard to get everything in to place to take it live.

For the creation of the new handbook, the "Developing for Drupal" and "About" handbooks will have some sections moved into the new book. The work will be happening this weekend, so those handbooks may be in a bit of disarray during the process. We are mostly moving existing pages or creating new ones so that no URLs will be harmed. Some pages may be rewritten to reduce duplication, but we are striving to not remove any pages.

What is it?

The driving idea behind the handbook is to not only tell people how to contribute to Drupal, but also to explain why, and encourage folks to explore contributing as a great way to actually learn and make their own Drupal lives better. The new handbook will cover everything from how to get an account on Drupal.org to how to use CVS.

MothersClick.com and the entire ParentsClick Network is very proud to announce that we've been acquired by Lifetime Entertainment. This marks a major milestone for a digital company whose online technology stack is largely built on Drupal.

The transaction is further proof that Drupal is competing with the likes of Ruby on Rails as a framework for high-tech startups. Lifetime's strategic acquisition of ParentsClick Network shows its belief that Drupal can power some of the largest online social community sites. Lifetime's VP of technology Nathan Potter states, "With the acquisition of ParentsClick, we continue to grow our core competency in Drupal development. With one of the largest and fastest growing Drupal-based communities anywhere, we will continue to show the world what Drupal is capable of."

Bill Fitzgerald, of FunnyMonkey, has written Drupal for Education and E-learning, due out from Packt Publishing in late October. Targeted for Drupal 6, this book covers how to set up community sites to support interactive teaching and learning. This book gives an overview of the functionality of Drupal core, and then gives precise instructions on using CCK, Views 2, Organic Groups, and a range of other contributed modules to extend the functionality of your site.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal.