From the earliest days of the Internet, many firms have tried to build community sites for medical professionals. Large sums of money were expended on technologies, and expectations around these feature-rich sites became very high.

So when a longstanding client, Jobson Healthcare Information (JHI) in New York, wanted to build a community website for America’s 200,000 pharmacists, we at ISL Consulting took it on as a welcome challenge. Given JHI's strong position in the market – they publish the most popular professional magazine for US pharmacists – we knew there would be no shortage of domain expertise or marketing prowess. The question was whether Drupal would permit us to build an affordable yet world-class website with everything from e-commerce to personalized pages, an elaborate friend activity notification system and other community features medical professionals have come to expect from professional sites.

Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for Drupal users of all experience levels, including module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even themers.

The book contains basic and advanced topics on Drupal performance that will appeal both to the Drupal novice and the advanced user or developer. With this book you will learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal 6 framework using best practice performance solutions and tools. The book covers how to vastly improve performance through upgrades, caching, configuring and optimization using core and contributed modules.

As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

Vital Signs 2.0 (VS) is an educational citizen science project consisting of an extensive Drupal website created by Image Works in Portland, Maine for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) and funded by the Hewlett Foundation and a generous in-kind donation of services by Image Works.

The VS project provides students, teachers, scientists, and citizen scientists with the tools to monitor environmental conditions throughout Maine. The project includes a structured central data repository, tools and protocols for identifying, mapping, tracking and analyzing the occurrence and spread of invasive species into and around the state. Beginning in fall 2009, these resources and supporting programs are being utilized on the laptop computers provided to all Maine middle school students and will be made available to all interested parties starting early 2010.

The project's site is composed of 13 original custom Drupal modules, approximately 2 dozen Drupal core modules, more than 40 contributed modules, Google Maps and other web services. In order to give back to the community that made this project possible, we are releasing the full source code for the website under the GPL license and adding it to the Drupal.org project repository.

Just a few years ago Drupal.org was maintained by a small team of insiders. Now, we are making major changes to the site using the community's many developers and themers.

This update provides the Drupal community our implementation redesign progress, where we've run into challenges, and provide information about our future plans.

The following update provides insight into:

After a highly successful Drupal deployment for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) national website, the ASMP decided to again use Drupal for their next project: Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow, or dpBestflow for short. DP Bestflow is a Library of Congress-funded initiative to provide an all-encompassing resource for digital photography best practices.

The ASMP once again teamed up with Chicago's Grillo Group for graphic design, and Philadelphia-based web development firm Context to perform the Drupal implementation. The most impressive part of the site, however, is the immense amount of rich, useful content, the majority of which is the handiwork of digital photography gurus Richard Anderson (author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow) and Peter Krogh (author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers).

After a lot of work, waiting, staging, and such I am proud to announce the addition of contributed projects to the automated testing system. Contributed projects may now take advantage of the same system that Drupal core developers have been using for over a year with great success. The deployment comes quickly after the recent 2.0 launch in late November of 2009. In addition to adding support for contributed project testing a number of other features have been added, most notably:

• Coder and Coder Tough Love review support.
• General e-mail notifications - the devlist mailing list will get an e-mail when Drupal core breaks.
• A number of UI/workflow improvments on drupal.org.
• Grouping of reviews by type or plugin to make room for a cleaner multiple database testing workflow.
• Additional administrative tools for qa.drupal.org and testing clients.
• Views RSS feed plugin for aggregation of test events and results.

For an example of the test results, please take a look at the current Drupal 7 (HEAD) results or one of our beta contributed project results, such as poormanscron.