A year after answering Dries Buytaert's call for Drupal book authors, Aaron Winborn is pleased to announce the publication of Drupal Multimedia, which is now available! Packt Publishing, known for their support of Open Source projects, will donate a portion of the book's royalties to the Drupal Association.

The book teaches the best practices and contributed modules for integrating Images, Video, and Audio into your site. Written for Drupal 6, the book assumes you are a developer, themer, or administrator who needs to embed multimedia. It makes heavy use of Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2, and offers demonstrations of the various modules required for the task.

The book helps to answer common questions, such as when to use Image or ImageField, how to leverage the power of FileField, and how to override theme functions to display multimedia content the way we need it.

For the third year in a row, Drupal has been nominated for a Packt Publishing Open Source CMS award. Packt Publishing is announcing winners all week. Today they announced the 2008 best PHP open source CMS.

The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.

Drupal won this award in both the popular vote and the judges selection. The judges cited improvements to installation, updates, breadth of features in modules, and how Drupal handles errors in these processes. Of special note was Drupal's use of social features and how those features integrate with web content management. Of course the final advantage Drupal had was the "large and hugely supportive community". This award belongs to everyone in the Drupal community for helping each other and particularly new users.

This morning Earl Miles, also known as merlinofchaos, was named one of the 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People. Earl won specifically for his contributions to the Drupal project.

Drupal 6.6 and Drupal 5.12, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

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.

Registration for DrupalCon DC is now open and the DrupalCon DC website live. In the two hours after the first announcement went out via Twitter, 200 people registered to come to DrupalCon! Discount tickets are still available at $175 a ticket - about 200 are left now so move quickly to make sure you get the lowest rate available. Also, there are already 18 sessions submitted and voting has begun - create a profile to vote on sessions and submit your own.