You may already have heard of Packt, the fast-growing publisher of hardcopy and digital books on specific technologies, due to the large number of Drupal books it has published over the years. However, you may not be aware that they recently relaunched their website, www.PacktPub.com, using Drupal as its framework.

Packt Publishing is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. Packt has so far published over 15 Drupal books and remains committed to producing practical solution-based books for Drupal developers, along with the best available online bookstore. The new website, which took 12 months from design to launch, was developed with UK-based Bluetel Solutions. The new version not only adds to the existing functionality of Packt’s original website, but now also offers a new, enhanced customer experience with an advanced design.

We are continuing to work to make DrupalCon Copenhagen as awesome as possible, but we wanted to take some time to give you an update on what we have been working on lately:

As you may have noticed, the deadline for submitting a session has been moved back to June 27th. Voting on the sessions opens on June 28th and closes on July 8th. We will notify all speakers and post the full schedule on July 18th. The votes for the different sessions will be used by the track chairs to inform their decision of which sessions get selected.

If your session isn't selected for one of the main conference tracks, please consider doing it as a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session instead. We will post more information about how to announce your BOF sessions as we get closer to the conference.

If you are not attending one of the training sessions on August 23rd, we would love to see you at the Unconference. This will be a perfect opportunity to connect with the local open source community and to discuss issues outside of the Drupal-sphere. The Unconference will be run BarCamp-style and it will be free to attend, but please register in advance to help us determine how much coffee we need to brew.

PitBulls.org is a community and information site centered around the American Pit Bull Terrier, usually referred to as Pit Bulls.

Pit Bulls get a lot of coverage in the media, usually negative, because there is rampant fear of the breed. They are also often the target of Breed Specific Legislation (BSL). PitBulls.org aims to share another perspective, those of passionate Pit Bull owners. The main mission of the site is to convey that Pit Bulls make great family pets, to get the word out that a dog is only a reflection how it is treated and raised, and to provide a central hub where owners can connect and share their pictures and stories.

The site was conceived and developed by PropDrop Web Development and Marketing. PropDrop not only does client work, but also performs web niche analysis and develops in-house web properties based on that research in order to gain market share in a wide variety of areas. PitBulls.org is one of these properties. It also doesn't hurt that we are dog lovers and own a Pit Bull/Lab mix named Bauer, so we are our own audience in some sense.

PropDrop uses Drupal exclusively for its in-house projects, because we can create a community and information site with some advanced features in under 2 weeks, with everything optimized for search with little effort. It also gives us the opportunity to expand a site's feature set in the future without interfering with current functionality, taking a site in directions that might not be possible with other content management systems.

On June 12, 2010, the Los Angeles Drupal user group is hosting Git with Drupal 7, a one-day event featuring both a Git bootcamp followed by a Drupal 7 code sprint. To make this event as accessible as possible, we're broadcasting the Git bootcamp via WebEx conference from 10am-1pm PDT. Please join us!

Drupal.org is moving from using the CVS version control system to Git for the development of Drupal 8. As Drupal core development is migrated to Git, thousands of developers will need to learn Git in order to help develop Drupal 8 as well as their own contributed modules for Drupal 7 when the contrib repository is moved to Git later this year.

The importance of moving to a modern version control system was outlined last year in step 5 of Dries' 8 Steps to Drupal 8. Git was selected after a lengthy evaluation discussion, and Drupal.org's migration to Git was the subject of The Exodus: Leading Drupal out of CVS, a session at DrupalCon San Francisco earlier this year. That session was well-attended and featured members of the Drupal.org Git Migration Team, including Damien Tournoud (DamZ), Derek Wright (dww), Angie Byron (webchick) and Sam Boyer (sdboyer).

During both the bootcamp and code sprint, we'll be gathered in the #drupal-la IRC channel and all are welcome to join us. We also recorded the Git bootcamp and posted the video online on blip.tv and on iTunes.

Act now if you want to get your DrupalCon Copenhagen ticket at the current price of €249. On June 28th at 8am CEST the ticket price will go up to €279.

Go to the conference site to buy your ticket for the conference, which will be held August 23-27.

Your ticket includes:

• 90 sessions spread out over 3 days
• Ad hoc BOF (birds of a feather) sessions
• Access to pre- and post-conference code and documentation sprints
• Access to the coder lounge where you can hang out and code when you're not attending sessions
• Access to fooBar, the official bar of DrupalCon Copenhagen
• …and, last but not least, a chance to meet your fellow Drupalers

Drupal 6.17, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system, is now available for download. There are no security fixes in this release. Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is recommended. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

Highlights of changes in this release include improvements of session cookie handling, better processing of big XML-RPC payloads, improved PostgreSQL compatibility, better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility, improved Japanese support in search module, better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation and improved logging for login failures. An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved. In total there were about 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6.