The Drupal community has been growing steadily over time, and recently started to outgrow our shared, single server system (Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM). The server hosts a variety of Drupal websites, including http://www.drupal.org/, http://cvs.drupal.org/, http://www.drupaldocs.org/ and a number of other sites.

As mentioned earlier, we have been talking to the Open Source Lab (OSL) at Oregon State University and they generously offered to provide free rack space, bandwidth, power, backup facilities and on-site support. OSL is responsible for taking care of some of the largest projects in the Open Source community, including the Apache Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. In order to take advantage of this generous offer, we need to supply our own equipment. Our initial plan was to purchase a modest dedicated server to replace our current shared system. However, thanks to the success of last week's donations, we will be able to roll out a more sophisticated server architecture to support the growth of our community. Read on for the details, and an extra "sun-prise" ...

On behalf of everyone who organized the fundraising, we want to extend a huge Thank You to everyone who donated and made this effort a monumental success!

In 48 hours, we managed to pull in just over $10,000 in mostly small donations from more than 250 generous folks. That's more than 300% of our intended goal -- an incredible feat for the Drupal community!

To maximize the benefit of your donations, we've partnered with the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University (thanks Scott and Corey!), and, in short order, have come up with a fantastic plan for the future infrasturcture of Drupal.org.

After what can only be described as the 'Extended Weekend from Hell', Drupal.org has been restored and is back in business.

First things first: what caused this outage, and why did it take so long to get the server back up? To phrase it simply and bluntly: misfortune, bad timing and miscommunication. Murphy's (annoying) law has been proven true once again.

In order to improve Drupal documentation usability, the Drupal handbook has been undergoing significant revision and feature enhancement:

• Longer handbook pages have been broken into multiple pages so as to allow the collaborative book to generate all section headings.
• Drupal handbook pages have DocBook XML and OPML export functions.
• The admin/help text available with Drupal core installations has been updated to include 60+ core and contributed modules (patch pending). Admin/help text will now be maintained on drupal.org in the modules and features section of the handbook.
• Handbook pages on drupal.org have additional blocks available in the sidebar providing useful links and information on handbook usage.
• Advanced Drupal users are providing additional configuration tutorials and code such as best practices and PHP page snippets.
• Based upon the user feedback gained in the recent card sort exercise, the Drupal handbook is being completely reorganized into multiple handbooks.

The Drupal project has released version 4.6.2 of its open-source content management platform. Drupal 4.6.2 is a maintenance release that provides corrections of problems reported using the bug tracking system. Drupal 4.6.2 also fixes two security vulnerabilities: one related to the use of Drupal's input filters and one in the XML-RPC library that Drupal ships with. Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is highly recommended. As the same bugs are also present in the Drupal 4.5 series, Drupal 4.5.4 is released as well.

There are no new features in these installments. For more information about the Drupal 4.6.x release series, please consult the Drupal 4.6.0 release announcement.

Look forward to an announcement next week about our Google Summer of Code students who will be working with us. We're very fortunate that Google has generously sponsored eleven (11) SoC stipends. As you can imagine, this means a lot of coding will get done this summer!

Update: See PlanetSoC for the latest news and progress on Summer of Code projects.

List of winners and projects (with mentor listed):