WePlaygroup was designed to be a social networking site for parents, with a focus on finding and creating playgroups. A playgroup is simply a gathering of similarly aged children, with one or more accompanying parents, that meet in social settings, which helps build interpersonal skills for the children. The site revolves around a user’s ZIP code, and provide location based information with regards to "near-by" content. I wanted parents to easily locate local playgroups, activity centers and kid-friendly restaurants.

To help maintain a member’s interest, I wanted to offer a host of other ancillary services: playgroup activities, parenting tips, articles and news feeds, family coupons and a general classifieds section - all of which can be contributed from and rated by other members. My goal was to provide as many opportunities as possible for the community to interact with each other, and the relevant content.

I also wanted to establish a sense of connectedness between content types. No matter where the user might end up, they would always have a chance to find some other resource that might be of interest (near-by restaurants to the playgroup they are considering joining; recent parenting tips on the playgroup activity page they’re replying to, etc.).

Update: Drupal 7.0 Beta 2 is available now!

Our final Drupal 7 alpha version was released about three weeks ago. Today, we're proud to announce the first beta version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback!

The jump between alpha to beta means the following:

• We think that we have resolved all critical data loss and security bugs in Drupal 7.
• We think that our APIs are now frozen enough so that contributed module and theme authors can start (or pick up again) their #D7CX pledges.
• We think that we have caught and fixed most of the problems with the upgrade path. We were able to successfully upgrade a copy of the Drupal.org database to Drupal 7.

That said, we definitely still have some bugs to shake out, and we need your help to find them! Especially new folks who haven't taken Drupal 7 for a spin yet. So please, do so, and let us know what bugs you find in the "Drupal core" issue queue (Please search incoming issues before filing).

What's new?

Tons of stuff! A revamped user interface, a new admin and default core theme, image handling in core, fields (CCK!) in core, module and theme upgrades from within the browser, an automated testing framework with over 24,000 tests, improved security and scalability, revamped database, AJAX, and file systems, jQuery 1.4, jQuery UI 1.8, RDFa, and literally gazillions of other things! Please see CHANGELOG.txt for a comprehensive list of all improvements in Drupal 7.

WikiWeightWatcher.com is a weight loss community website that allows users to view, add, and change Weight Watchers points and nutrition facts for restaurants and food items. It was initially launched in the fall of 2008, has grown to over 7,000 registered users, and currently receives over 3,000 unique visitors a day.

PropDrop is a company specializing in web development and marketing, focusing on niche websites and small businesses and organizations, doing anything from church websites to veterinarian websites. They did both the initial development, the new custom theme, and the implementation of the new features.

The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its flagship web site, economist.com. The homepage is Drupal powered, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more. The Economist evaluated several open source CMS and proprietary solutions aimed at media publishers. In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces. The Economist will be adding lots of social tools to its site over time, and doing so on its existing platform was too slow/inefficient.

The Economist hired Cyrve to migrate its large and volatile dataset to Drupal. With the sponsorship and encouragement of The Economist, Cyrve open sourced its migrate module which is the heart of its migration methodology. The Economist and Cyrve hope this article helps more sites migrate to Drupal.

Greg (drupal.org user greggles) is a developer, site builder, security analyst, and trainer for Growing Venture Solutions.

Greg’s many contributions to Drupal:

• Founder and “(dis)organizer” of the Denver Drupal User Group meetings
• Maintainer of popular modules such as Pathauto, Comment Notify and Token
• Co-lead of Groups.Drupal.org building and maintenance
• Co-Creater of Hyperlocal news installation profile
• Active Member of the Drupal Security Team
• Author of Cracking Drupal, the only book about using Drupal security
• Organizer and presenter at Drupalcamps
• Member of the Drupal Association General Assembly
• Supporter of improvements in the drupal.org infrastructure and the drupal.org redesign

FunnyMonkey is pleased to announce the release of VoiceBox, a community discussion and aggregation platform. Using VoiceBox, an organization can set up a site that allows people to create profiles, start discussions, upload content from mobile phones, comment on one another's posts, share content to other social media platforms, and follow incoming news feeds.

The VoiceBox installation profile simplifies the work of groups looking to create or expand their online presence. Organizations looking for a place for their stakeholders to publish, collaborate, and get more informed could use VoiceBox to support these goals.

The site was designed to support community media and other grassroots organizations, but the base functionality can be used in a variety of different contexts. VoiceBox can easily support a school newspaper, or, with some modifications, it could work as the public-facing site for organizations that want to communicate with their stakeholders and develop a community around their work. In particular, the blend of content aggregation, internal site discussions, repurposing content within issues, and sharing out to external sites via social media helps connect the smaller communities of individual organizations with larger external groups that share a common interest.

VoiceBox was built by FunnyMonkey as part of the Knight Drupal Initiative, which was funded by the Knight Foundation.