Attention all students: you can now submit your applications to Google's Summer of Code program for 2007. There is a huge list of open source programs that are mentoring students this year, and Drupal is one of them. Google pays each successful student $4,500 USD and the Drupal Association gets $500 per student as well. Drupal treats its students well, each of whom will be assigned two mentors to work with. In addition, each student will have their own group on groups.drupal.org, plus lots of exposure during and after the project. For many students, participating in GSoC is the beginning of their career as a professional Drupal developer or consultant.

Please read Drupal's page on Summer of Code 2007, our advice on writing GSoC applications, and the list of proposed projects. There is a group for general GSoC 2007 discussions where you can make contact with mentors and other prospective students, and there is also #drupal-soc on irc.freenode.net where you can usually chat with mentors and students.

Applications must be submitted by March 24.

March Drupal Madness Baby!!! The next Washington, DC, Drupal Meet-up will be on Wednesday, March 14th, at the Science Club (1136 19th Street, NW) at 7pm. The timing is great with it happening right before Drupalcon US, which I know a lot of the folks in DC are planning to attend. What better way to get excited for the conference than to get a bunch of laptops out and show some new tools that people are using! Forget the projector and formal presentations that we normally do - we're bringing a wifi router and want people to come and show off their work and get to know more folks over beer.

If you don't have anything to show or are not so technical, this is an awesome opportunity to see what Drupal is capable of and learn how Drupal works for other organizations and hear about the experiences they've had with it.

We're proud to announce the release of E-Commerce Version 3. This release is compatible with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5.x!

We've added, removed, refactored and debugged a great deal of code since the previous 4.7 release: invoicing, anonymous purchasing, recurring payments, flexible charges, new shipping methods just to name a few. Please refer to the release notes for a full list of new features and improvements.

E-Commerce now has Versions?

With changes to the Drupal release system, E-Commerce now comes in flavours called "Versions". The current Version 3 can be downloaded for Drupal 4.7 or Drupal 5. Each of these releases contains the same features. Hence Version 3 is defined by it's features.

Thanks to the hard work of several contributors, drupal.org can now automatically provide information about the latest official releases of drupal core and any contributed modules. The Update status module can check this information to tell you if your site needs to be updated. While it does not have information about development releases or modules acquired via CVS, if your site uses primarily officially released modules, you can easily tell which of your modules need to be updated.

This module will inform you that you are out of date by visiting the main administration page, and another page displays the status of Drupal and your installed modules. For more information, there is a Frequently Asked Questions available on the update status project page!

For many of us, Drupal is very much a labor of love. It's a story of having fun and working hard. If you follow what we do, it's easy to understand what we're all about -- making it easy to build websites, both for users and developers. Passion spreads and as a result, Drupal's size and scope has grown beyond what an ad hoc group of volunteers can realistically manage. Organizing last summer's Drupal conference in Brussels would have been a lot easier with some financial backing, for example. Maintaining, scaling, upgrading, and improving the Drupal.org infrastructure is becoming a monumental task.

In response, we're proud to launch the Drupal Association. The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization with one goal: to support the Drupal project.

I recently finished renewing the website for a local event (a theater festival) at my ex-university. The site serves as brochure and blog around the event. Because the festival is mostly a promotional thing, a lot of work was put into the style and branding for each year's edition.

This year's design is centered around a 1930's carnival. The site is entirely powered by Drupal and uses a PHPTemplate theme with a CSS based layout that's heavy on images. There is also some JavaScript to make the ticket act like a real ticket (with punch holes and serial numbers) and 2 funny easter eggs hidden around the site.