Packt Publishing has announced the overall winner of their 2007 Open Source CMS Award and it's Drupal! This first place award comes with a cash prize of $5,000, the highest of the cash prizes offered, which will be used by the Drupal Association to help the Drupal project flourish.

When asked about the award, Dries Buytaert (Drupal project founder) said, "The past year, we have worked hard to make Drupal more powerful and easier to use. It is great to see the Drupal community receive recognition for their hard work and dedication." Congratulations, team!

The forthcoming Drupal 6.x builds on the features recognized by this award, and offers a number of compelling improvements, including:

* Enhanced localization and i18n support
* Performance improvements and Improved Caching
* OpenID Client Support
* Task automation with Actions and Trigger system
* Many usability enhancements

Palantir.net is pleased to announce the recent launch of the new Drupal Web site for the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). One of the nation's leading art museums in its development of new media content, the IMA is committed to using cutting-edge museum technology as a means to engage and educate its visitors.

We collaborated with design partner Studio Blue and the IMA’s marketing and technical staff to develop a highly functional and visually engaging site that incorporates many of the hottest “Web 2.0” technologies like folksonomic tagging, blogs, podcasts, YouTube integration, and AJAX-style visual effects. The use of Drupal 5 was instrumental to the success of this highly ambitious project.

During the development of the main IMA site, Palantir also simultaneously built the Drupal-based Web site for the IMA's Roman Art from the Louvre exhibit. This site, which was also designed by Studio Blue, leverages the design of the main Museum site to provide users with information about this high-profile exhibit, including picture galleries, a collection of IMA-produced "Webisodes" in a variety of video formats, and a Google Maps mash-up that allows users to view the origin point of various artifacts in the collection.

Update: Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 is available now!

Our first Drupal 6 beta version was released just over a month ago, so given the large number of usability improvements and bug fixes that we've added since then, we're proud to announce the release of the second beta version of Drupal 6.x for your testing. This beta version includes all the latest security bug fixes as released in Drupal 5.3 and 4.7.8. The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

The most notable change is that we moved the long time favorite Drupal.module out of the Drupal package. It will instead be available as the contributed Site network module. This was done because Drupal 6 has a more secure and widely supported solution for distributed authentication in the form of the OpenID standard.

We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous beta. We fixed numerous PHP notices, upgraded to jQuery 1.2.1, included a more secure solution for IN() queries, added schema based load and save functions, extended built-in AHAH functionality so developers can write AHAH code without JavaScript for different types of form elements, merged .schema files with .install files, made it possible for themes to override core and module CSS files and made it possible to have comment settings per node type, among a number of other improvements.

Drupal 4.7.8 and 5.3 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as some security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Download Drupal 5.3.
• Download Drupal 4.7.8.

Last week, Geoff Butterfield of the George Lucas Educational Foundation and myself went to Google and gave a tech talk with an overview of Drupal, who uses it, and how it works, and then specifics about how it's implemented in the site Edutopia.org. Geoff went into details about how extensive use of Taxonomy, Views, and CCK helped make the website possible.

Check it out!

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a U.S. nonprofit foundation dedicated to the news industry. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. The foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change.

The Knight News Challenge contest awards $5 million for innovative media ideas, however the October 15 application deadline is quickly approaching. The streamlined application takes less than 20 minutes. Anybody worldwide has a chance to win. For more information and to apply visit www.newschallenge.org.

Last year, Drupal contributors Benjamin Melançon and Lisa Williams were both awarded grants.

In particular, the Knight Foundation is looking for open source projects that improve local communities and have a news focus. The only restrictions for applying are outlined in their FAQ. Your proposal must be:

* Digital – Your idea uses digital technology (computers, the internet, cell phones, that sort of thing).
* Innovative – Your idea is new and original. It’s different from what people have done before. You are, in some way, breaking new ground.
* News/information – Your idea is about giving people access to what they want to know.