With the release of 4.7.0 beta1, I will be co-sponsoring a bug hunt competition to be concluded with the release of 4.7.0. The prize will be a combination of 150USD from the Google Summer of Code and an additonal 200USD donated by me.

I will count the opened, non-duplicate issues marked as "CVS" or "4.7..." in the Drupal project issue's tracker between now and 4.7.0 are released. First place will be 200USD, second will be 100USD, and third will be 50USD. In reality, anyone using Drupal will be the winner as the more bugs found and fixed before 4.7.0 means a stronger build for every user.

We are pleased to announce that the first Drupal 4.7 beta release is available. It is available for immediate download at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-beta1.tar.gz.

This beta release marks an important step towards the final Drupal 4.7.0 release, which hopefully will be released in 4-6 weeks. Drupal 4.7.0 will be our most exciting release to date, with some cool new features and many under the hood improvements. Some enhancements include; free tagging, contact form functionality, easier menu management, a better default theme engine (PHPTemplate), improved search functionality, theme-specific block regions, improved PostgreSQL support, themeable forms, a better upgrade script, better revisions handling and much more.

At the same time Drupal 4.7.0 will be a tad smaller (better code re-use, the queue module and comment moderation moved to the contributions repository) and a tad faster. Finally, to liven up your various Web 2.0 dreams, we sprinkled the code with AJAX in an attempt to simplify some administrative tasks. (Yes, it should degrade gracefully.)

I am pregnant (woohoo!). In six short months, I will be disappearing from active duty in the Drupal community for a good long time. I'd like to discuss a desire I've had for years and years, only reworked for our beloved codebase. In short: an HTML based browser role playing game, though ultimately an API.

Due to just some plain sillyness, I did a search for "THE" using Google. Why anyone would search for something like that is quite beyond me, but I try to maintain my sanity with this excuse: I wanted to search for a word in the English language that is guaranteed to get a lot of hits - got 9.5 billion hits for the word.

GUADEC, the GNOME desktop users and developers international conference, is moving to a Drupal based website. We want to invite GNOME friends fluent with Drupal in the development of the site in order to make a better use of this web platform. Not only to help organising a great GUADEC 2006, also to contribute to the debate about the gnome.org website evolution.

Check out my DrupalCon AMS 2005 Opening video (18MB MPEG4 file) over on Now Public. My thanks again to Bèr, Bert, and Dries for organizing it and for the Drupalers who participated! I love events like these!