Just wanted to let you all know that we split the infrastructure mailing list into two parts: a mailing list for Drupal.org webmasters, and a mailing list for Drupal.org server administrators. This separation should allow us to better coordinate the maintenance and development of the various Drupal.org websites.

The "Drupal.org webmasters" are responsible for the organization of the websites, the Drupal.org brand, blocking spam, dealing with user account problems and so on. The "Drupal.org server administrators" on the other hand, fiddle with the Apache and MySQL configurations, the mail server, the CVS repositories, and will take on the task of upgrading the various Drupal.org websites.

In addition to a dedicated mailing list, each group also got a dedicated issue tracker: issues for webmasters and issues for server administrators. If you bump into a problem related to the Drupal.org websites, try to select the correct project.

And last but not least, we're actively looking for more people to get involved with the day-to-day maintenance of all our infrastructure and the continued development of new bells and whistles. As you might have read, Drupal grew by more than 230% in 2006, and hopefully we'll be able to welcome many new users throughout 2007. This continued growth requires us not only to streamline our workflow, but also to get more people on board to help.

Drupal 4.6.11 and Drupal 4.7.5 are available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as two security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Drupal 4.7.5 can be downloaded from http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-4.7.5.tar.gz.
• Drupal 4.6.11 can be downloaded from http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-4.6.11.tar.gz.

Drupal.org has added a new web site to the family: groups.drupal.org (g.d.o). The site has been active for quite some time, but we didn’t announce it here while we were tweaking the knobs. Despite that, g.d.o already boasts 237 groups and 9355 group subscriptions. You may login using your drupal.org username and password. Remember to append @drupal.org to your username. Also be sure to update your g.d.o email address after logging in so that you receive group notification emails.

g.d.o just smoothly upgraded to the Drupal 5 Release Candidate. That makes g.d.o the first drupal.org hosted site to run the upcoming Drupal release.

groups.drupal.org serves the Drupal community by providing a place for groups to organize, plan and work on projects. Real world local user groups in particular are encouraged to setup their online presence here.

Examples of local user groups on the groups site are Boston and Brazil. These local user groups are analogous to Meetup groups. Events from these groups are automatically syndicated to a block on the drupal.org home page. We also have working groups such as Internationalization, Drupal Dojo, and Javascript.

A group is like a mini-site within a larger Drupal site. Each group gets its own home page, faces page (subscription required), own categories (see block in upper right), and choice of language (we currently support 7 languages). Each group has own membership, email notifications, RSS feeds, administrators, and on and on.

The groups site makes use of some terrific Contributed modules such as Organic Groups, Views, Pathauto, Helptip, Markdown with Smartypants and Autotimezone. See the About page for more information.

Any registered user is welcome to create a group on this site, subject to the guidelines presented there. In particular, please don’t duplicate existing groups and make sure you are committed to doing the hard work associated with growing/managing your group.

Please browse our directory of groups and subscribe to those which are interest you. Enjoy!

I'm excited to announce the formation of The Drupal Dojo, a community group dedicated to increasing the proficiency of apprentice and journeyman-level developers. The Dojo will work through the groups.drupal.org forums, and an IRC channel.

A middle-tier developer community is good for the project as a whole (#drupal intimidates a lot of people), and for enterprising individuals like myself, the idea of being able to build stronger relationships with up-and-coming developers makes obvious business sense. Seems like a classic win-win. I'll be posting on group progress as it evolves.

If a tradition is defined as something that happens once before, we have a long standing tradition of making predictions for the Drupal year ahead. This year as well, we will be looking back to see how people predicted 2006 and you can make your own predictions for Drupal in 2007.