Hello all. This topic serves as both an announcement and a call for volunteers.

After seeing numerous calls and wishes for Drupal to be seen to run with an ORACLE back end, I decided to have a bash at the task. A few months ago I got stuck in and, after some work, was finally pleased to see Core Drupal 4.7 and the ORACLE 9i/10g platform cuddling up to each other. Having spent a fair amount of time in the testing phase, I found the results to be favourable and was very pleasantly surprised to see that, performance-wise, it wasn't being left to eat the dust left behind by a similar Drupal installation running under MySQL. I have written a few paragraphs about my thoughts here.

After listening to the Brussels Drupalcon podcast I thought it would be good to post a general write up on the state of support on Drupal.org and what new people or people not really involved can do to help out. A lot of this is unscientific and opinion based.

Drupal has experienced phenomenal growth over the years. This is not new. I am user id 5195 and started 3 years ago. As I post this we have more then 80,000 registered accounts and a growing list of involved companies selling Drupal services. Maybe someone (mythical someone) could do a date, user registration graph to see the current curve. Past graphs showed this.

Over the years many people have joined in (or were already helping) and provided support and answers to a large number of people. Some posts have gone unanswered. My feeling on this is the numbers have gone up but the overall percentage of unanswered posts have gone down. Numbers because we've got over 80,0000 registered users and not all that many folks answering questions in the forums. A lot of unanswered posts are multiple from the same person. A person asking a question, not liking the answer and posting it again. Or someone posting an unclear question and it not getting answered. Or the few who would know that are on holiday and missed it. It happens.

We need to try and emphasize the Drupal mission and principles more in response when some new person comes in all fired up to start a fight rather then get involved and help out.

So, the summary first..... All in all, not bad. Could be better. Could be worse. We still need more people returning the help they have received from others to the next generation of Drupal users. As Drupal core and contrib have continued to evolve into the next generation and our exposure to the rest of the world continues to grow, we gain whole new classes of users, developers and implementers. Read on for some ideas on how to help out and contribute back to the project that gave this great tool-set/CMS.

Now onto some realities and how you can help out.

After a lengthy debate, the core Drupal system is moving to a new, more simple convention for its version numbers: there will only be 2 digits. For example, the forthcoming stable release will be version 5.0. The 5 represents the major revision of Drupal, and indicates what modules and themes will be compatible with it. The 0 is the patch level, and indicates that it will be the first release of this version of Drupal. Subsequent bug fixes and security patches will be released as 5.1, 5.2, and so on. New features will only be added to the next version of Drupal core, (the 6.0 release in this case). You can find out more about this topic by reading version numbers, policies and which version you should use.

25th - 26th October 2006
Olympia 2, London, UK

Join us at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2006, London to learn more about Drupal. We will be present at the .Org village alongside Mozilla Europe, Joomla, Debian, Gentoo, OpenBSD and a lot of other great projects.

We are happy to report that the domain Drupal.com has been generously donated by Cedric Johnson of the OpenDomain.org organization. The domain had been obtained by OpenDomain.org as part of their effort to become involved in open source projects by buying expensive domains and letting projects build websites with them. According to Cedric Johnson, “We don’t sell domains nor do we transfer them. Instead, we buy domains so organizations that share our view of responsible open sourcing can use them for free in promoting these open technologies. It’s a different way to contribute to open sourcing, and it’s the kind of collaborative spirit that made the Internet possible.” In the case of Drupal.com, the domain has been transferred directly to Dries, free of charge, as an outright donation to the Drupal project.

When: Oct 13 @ 7:00 PM - Oct 15 @ 7:00 PM
Where: http://www.tekrepublik.com/ - 5310 Burnet Austin, TX

The League of Tech Voters has a code-a-thon in Austin, TX for advocacy tools. They say "we are gonna lock up 100 programmers for 48 hours and see what kind of open source software they will help write for non-profits!"

More information can be found on the groups posting