Drupal has a substantial amount of good documentation; the documented code as seen on api.drupal.org, the developers handbook and even the installation and configuration guide has lots of good stuff in it. It also has older stuff that doesn't get updated in a timely manner and can be confusing. The last major handbook re-organization was Jan 2006 and that was a substantial improvement. Currently, just the three main books would be over 1,400 pages printed out.

One of Drupal's strengths also leads to it's frustrations. Drupal is flexible, it is content centric, so you can accomplish a given task in multiple ways. This is something that can be very hard to have people find the time to document. For those who haven't spent time writing HowTo documentation, it takes a lot longer than one would first think.

So, the problem, long term sustainable documentation with Drupal is difficult. Drupal core moves and changes with each version. For many versions, most of these changes resulted in only minor cosmetic differences in the user interface and menu placement.

With the release of Drupal 5, these user interface differences becomes rather substantial. JQuery's addition to Drupal in version 5 actually expands the UI possibilities in even more ways. With Drupal 6 we will see more interface and additions to core capabilities.

So what to do? At the Yahoo OSCMS I discussed this with a lot of people and came up with a new plan for the direction of some of the documentation and have been working on it since. For an identified base documentation we will use DocBook v5, commit it to CVS and version per Drupal release and generate PDF's in addition to having it live online in the handbook.

Update: Session videos are available!

This last weekend we held a Drupal track as part of FrOSCon 2007. It was a great success.

The two day event celebrated its second year by getting bigger, better, more interesting, and by having a lot more Drupal. We had a lecture room that saw 20-50 people in attendance for the 12 lectures. Upstairs we had a developers' room which was a bit out of the way and badly advertised (something that we can do better next year), so fewer people were there to participate in Drupal hacking.

Lots of great presentations were given by familiar names such as Gábor Hojtsy, Gerhard Killesreiter, Károly Négyesi, Konstantin Käfer and myself. Others made their Drupalcon debut: Olav Schettler, Marco Rademacher, Balázs Dianiska, and Jutta Horstmann.

Drupaller Noel Hidalgo is traveling the world in seven months and documenting Open Source, Drupal, freedom, and many other aspects of his experience in his Luck of Seven web site.

In Antwerp, he met with Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, and interviewed him.

The interview is now up on the Luck of Seven web site.

Warning for those on a slow link: this is 132MB.

Aug 20, 2007 marked the end of the 2007 Google Summer of Code. Below is a table of this year's students, their projects, along with links to download and (where available) try them out. Please help test and provide feedback!

Please note too that we'll be having a Summer of Code wrap-up call on Sunday, Aug 26 from 11AM - 2PM Pacific (US) time, for students to talk about their projects, share lessons learned, etc.

Each Drupalcon, I try to provide a State of Drupal presentation to communicate our current Zeitgeist and to share my ideas about what I think is important for Drupal. Next month's DrupalCon Barcelona is no exception.