This is a summary of what the developers are working since Dries has opened the new developer tree on Apr 7, 2005. I presume that you are familiar with Drupal 4.6, I'll list only the major news. This does not mean we discredit those who have fixed bugs, improved help texts and so on, but this newsletter can't include all the changes.

According to our fancy status page only a small number of translations is available for Drupal 4.6. I've been asked by Dries to urge translators to branch translation projects for 4.6. The translations might not fit in all cases but having a small set of translated strings is better than no translated strings. The more common strings also do not change that often between versions. If there are any problems, add comments to this post and I'll see what I can do.

Cheers,
Gerhard
Translations coordinator

On boxesandarrows.com you can find a good article about the use of patterns for the user interface. The staff of Yahoo! wanted to make sure that reinventing the wheel regarding the best user interface within Yahoo! would stop by facilitating the designers with some sort of a “knowledge blog”.

In this blog they could post their ideas, standards, rank them and hence create a more consistency, predictability userinterface across the Yahoo! sites. They describe in depth how the process from their functional requirements towards implementation went and how they made sure everybody would join in and use the tool. Yahoo considered different technologies (Blog applications, CMSs, Groupware and Wikis) and implementations (Movable Type, pMachine, PHPNuke, PHPCollab, Tikiwiki and yes: Drupal).

And after they ranked all techniques and implementations, Yahoo! choose for drupal: "Ultimately, we chose Drupal because of its breadth of capabilities, powerful taxonomy, and extensibility"

The article features some nice workflow charts and screenshots. It is nice to see that a big search engine like Yahoo! is using Drupal internally.

For the last several weeks the Drupal documentation team has been working to organize and create documentation. We have come up with several documentation handbooks that we believe will best meet your needs. Almost 200 of you have taken the time to tell us why you use Drupal documentation, what you need, and why you would decide to use Drupal documentation again.

Dries and I implemented some DrupalCon ideas regarding the contact page. Drupal.org's contact page has been revamped so anyone can contact the team regarding various subjects. The form is simple to use: fill in your name and e-mail address, select a subject, and type in the message. You do not need to specify recipients, the system routes the messages to the appropriate people based on the selected subject. We just rolled out the new contact form but plan to add more subjects.

After a few months of running as beta we are now live! The Drupal Theme Garden lost its beta status. The Theme Garden is a place where you can smell the Drupal themes, wander around in very interesting themes, and enjoy Drupal artwork.