I am happy to announce the formation of DrupalZA, a new DUG (Drupal User Group) for South African Drupal users, developers and designers.

Additionally I would like to announce a DrupalCamp in Johannesburg which is a a primer course, for already existing web developers that I am planning to teach somewhere around the end of June 2006. My friends at Obsidian Systems have kindly offered the use of their training center and the course will run for a total of 5 days, for 4 or 5 hours every evening.

Organizing face to face drupal training's was one of those no-brainer good ideas that we've talked on and off about doing for more than a year. In the month leading up to the phenominal DrupalCon Vancouver I was personally getting pinged multiple times a day with requests for leads on Drupal hires. Servicing firms, startups, and organizations rolling out large Drupal projects all wanted to bring web developers on board who had the requisite knowledge and experience working with Drupal. The only problem was the well was getting dry; a glut of new work met a finite number of trained and hire-able Drupal hackers, leaving a lot of work on the table and my email box flooded with emails inquiring where I was hiding all the Drupal talent.

We're happy to announce the second release candidate of Drupal 4.7 is now available. Since the first release candidate a week ago, 55 more issues have been fixed (the changelog lists all changes). No known critical issues remain, so unless new major problems arise, this will be the last release candidate before Drupal 4.7.0 final.

We invite you to help us test this latest release, so that 4.7.0 will be a trouble-free ride for everyone.

Drupal 4.7 RC2 can be downloaded at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-rc2.tar.gz.

19:00 Wed 12 April 2006
The Boxing Club
Limeouse Town Hall
London
E14 7HA

Bring your laptop and your Drupal problems and successes down to The Boxing Club in Limehouse, to find other people who have done the same. See what happens. We can't promise much more than that!

The main idea is to bring and share our experiences and to help people through the difficult bits.

Hello fellow Drupal lovers!

It's that time again, time to bring out the best Drupal has to offer and show it to the world. On this the sixth Drupal Newsletter we have another big moment in the life of Drupal, the soon to be released Drupal 4.7. This version will be unprecedented and will add features like AJAX and Module Installation that will bring Drupal to the forefront of the CMS race and keep it there for some time to come.

Our job as writers is an important one. It's our responsibility, nay, duty to make sure Drupal's horn is properly blown to the world. The majority of sections are still waiting to be written for this newsletter, and Drupal needs you to volunteer some of your time and skill to write.

You don't have to be an extremely well versed writer, you don't even have to spell everything write...er..right, so long as you're somewhat passionate about Drupal. Articles are relatively short, between 75 and 200 words, with 100 being the average. You can write about any subject, so long as it's related to Drupal (or even CivicSpace's distribution of the Drupal core) such as "Drupal sightings", personal experiences, developer notes, user tips or even Drupal events. So long as it's about Drupal, we want it!

The deadline for all articles is April 7th, and a draft will go out on the 8th. If you're interested in writing a piece for the next newsletter, email me (contact form) and let me know, and I'll reserve a place for it.

For these newsletters to work we need ordinary Drupal users to step out and donate a bit of their time to spread Drupal to the world!

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Lord Dries did say to Drupallites everywhere, "We will feature freeze Drupal 4.7 in a week, and then we shall commence stabilizing and bug fixing and so on."

And the community said, "BUT WAIT!!"

And so began a flurry of fervent activity to cram all of our desired features and functionality into Drupal. The glorious crowning achievement was the new Forms API, which greatly improved the security, extensibility, and themability of forms.

And the community said, "Let's rock and roll!"

However, all was not good. For soon came the bug reports, the module compatibility issues, and the various forms API-related headaches.

And the community said, "Oh, crap."