Views 2 is currently being updated for Drupal 6 compatibility, but it needs major help in order to be ready for the Drupal 6's approximate release date! We're short on people and short on time, so here's the bottom line. Without your assistance and contributions, there will be no Views for Drupal 6 within any useful timeframe. If we don't have Views 2 ready for the D6 release date, the vast majority of casual users might not even bother to download and try Drupal 6. That would be bad, so you need to get involved in helping to complete Views 2 so this scenario doesn't happen!

For the Drupal community's participation in the 2007 Google Summer of Code program, Google donated $10,000 USD to the Drupal Association earlier this week. This amount represents 10% of the $100,000 USD allocated to Drupal's Summer of Code students. We'd like to sincerely thank Google for this tremendous contribution, which will be used to fund infrastructure improvements and to sponsor Drupal events (among other things). We'd also like to thank Drupal's extensive mentoring team for helping to make this possible.

Google Summer of Code is a program which awards stipends to students who successfully complete an open source coding project. Students from around the world apply to Google-selected "mentoring organizations" (open source projects, Universities, and so on) to work either on projects of their own devising or to implement projects set out by each organization. The top applicants are allocated $5,000 each, of which $4,500 goes to the student upon successful completion of their project, and $500 goes to the mentoring organization. A designated mentor from the mentoring organization helps to advise the student during the course of their project.

This year, Drupal was awarded 20 student slots, which resulted in a number of new contributors and awesome projects, including several internationalization improvements in Drupal 6. Many of our 2006 and 2005 Summer of Code alumni helped out this year as mentors, or even as return students for a second round! We'll be ramping up efforts soon to make Summer of Code 2008 the biggest and best yet! :) If you're interested in helping out, leave a comment at http://groups.drupal.org/node/7157.

Gorton Studios is proud to announce the relaunch of The Rake Magazine as a Drupal site. The Rake is an arts and culture magazine based in Minneapolis/St. Paul. The magazine is known for its strong storytelling focus as well as its unapologetic brand of humor, style, and personality.

The main goals of this new site were to expose The Rake’s rich resources (about 7,000 nodes) and help visitors find interesting content quickly. It features a wealth of carefully highlighted and cross-connected articles, integration with the organization’s pre-existing Event and Restaurant database (still managed outside of Drupal) and a bevy of blogs.

Simplifying administrative overhead was a key mandate from the outset. The old system was an unwieldy mix of Movable Type blogs and custom CMS content. Updating and featuring content had become an overwhelming process that was preventing The Rake‘s online edition from growing into something more fluid and community-oriented. The new site has enabled much more frequent updating, thanks to easily edited content and a robust permissions system.

Read on for some of the modules and techniques involved in building this site.

UPDATE4:Thank-you to the 41 people and 22 organizations that signed for membership since this announcement was posted. We now have over 157 paid members and have raised 6162.01 EURO in memberships out of 7500EUR to pay for this hardware.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support the Drupal.org infrastructure, the Drupal Association has further bulked up our hardware resources with 10 GB of RAM and a new master database server. These improvements will help us deal with the exponential growth curve the Drupal community has been experiencing, and help us prepare for the anticipated growth due to Drupal 6.

The Drupal Association spent approximately $11,000 USD on hardware. To help pay for these upgrades and support the Drupal.org infrastructure, please purchase a membership (individual, organization). Your membership will help the association plan and spend money to support the Drupal.org infrastructure and Drupal events such as Drupalcons for the next 12 months.

You can learn about the evolving architecture of our infrastructure in these diagrams. You can learn about our efforts to scale the Drupal.org architecture in this presentation. You can also view a picture of the new database server.

We have just released the library for Prototype Javascript developers - Scripteka - built on Drupal. It might sound ironic at first that jQuery-favoring CMS was used to build a Prototype community resource - however the back-end power of Drupal is way too attractive. We had to cut jQuery out of use in our theme. Our purpose was to simply provide one place where all the Prototype-based scripts could be exposed, consolidated, and rated by the community.

The Drupal Association welcomes proposals from aspiring DrupalCon organizers. The association board votes and approves DrupalCon proposals. Smaller events, such as DrupalCamps are self organized and do not require approval by the association. We are requesting proposals that meet the following guidelines.

DrupalCon conference proposal guidelines