The OSCMS conference in Vancouver allowed upwards of 250 people to gather together and collaborate, discuss, plan, and yes, code. The 3 days were an intense blur of presentations, hacking sessions, food (and drinks), socializing, skiing, and musical mayhem courtesy of the Quadruplicons. Meeting face-to-face allowed many important issues for Drupal to be brought to the forefront and see progress made, including:

• Identifying important areas in which to focus, including the File API, Views, Actions, Workflows, and Relationships
• Helping to streamline efforts going into Drupal community processes, through Drupal Enhancement Proposals (DEPs), working groups, and local user groups
• Making serious headway in terms of increasing Drupal's usability
• The Drupal 4.8 roadmap (or lack thereof ;))

Read more to find out the finer action points and pointers to write-ups of the various sessions. This post has been collaboratively written by the various attendees.

I am a social observer, change agent and community facilitator in the process of developing an on-line enterprise, using Drupal. Imagine my delight when the free, open DrupalCon landed in Vancouver in time to expand my understanding of the technology. The technology field, rarely portrayed as socially adroit, seemed an unlikely source for lessons about community development but that is what I got as techno-stereotypes were blown out of the water at DrupalCon 2006, Vancouver. The Drupal Community is special and deserves celebrating.

Just a massive thanks to Dries and all other developers for bringing Drupal.org so far. There are 50000 posts on this site now. That's huge. I remember when I made the 33333th post. So many, so quickly.

Lets just hope 4.7 comes out soon! I can't wait.

Last week was DrupalCon Vancouver, with folks from all over the world converging to share, argue, network and babble about Drupal. If you're like Tim Jones, you didn't go to this at all-- but you would have if it had been happening, say, on U Street instead of in Canada.

On that principle, Tim Jones, Eric Gunderson, and myself (Ted Serbinski) have decided to invite anyone who's interested to join us next Thursday for the first Dodge City Drupal MeetUp.

One of the big issues with HTML has always been the limited support for different fonts, especially across browser and across platforms. SIFR is a well-known technique to replace HTML text with Flash fonts on the fly -- see the SIFR main page for more info. The text remains selectable and linkable, and the underlying HTML tags (h1, h2, etc.) are still fully accessible and indexed by search engines. See Typophile for a great, Drupal-powered example of this.

Up until now, integrating the scripts required has meant building it once and putting all the code directly into your theme. With this module, any Drupal user will be able to select which fonts (aka typography for the design nerds) to use, control which HTML paths (e.g. h1.title, .block-title, etc.) should be replaced, upload your SWF font files, and everything else to make it a seamless experience. Future versions may even allow the direct uploading of font files which will be converted server-side to SWF directly.

It is my regret that I must announce I am taking a leave of absence from drupal.org for the next few months to focus exclusively on my work outside of Drupal. Since the beginning of last summer when I took on the role of Drupal Documentation Coordinator, we've seen significant efforts from members of the Drupal community to support the Drupal user base with new and better documentation. For example,

• An increase in the amount of documentation provided in the Drupal handbooks.
• Revision and expansion of the admin/help documentation in Drupal core and contributed modules, documentation that is now maintained on drupal.org so that everyone can assist in its construction.
• Reorganization and restructuring of the handbook into multiple handbooks.
• Inclusion of PHP snippets.
• Tagging of handbook pages and forum posts with Drupal version information.
• Guidelines and recommendations for assisting newbies in understanding how to participate on drupal.org.