FOSDEM, which stands for Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is a free and non-commercial event for the open source community, held in Brussels (Belgium) on February 26-27. Each year (or at least the past three years), FOSDEM sets up developer rooms where teams can meet, discuss, hack and present the latest developments about their project. For more information about FOSDEM's developer rooms, read their Call for presence.
The Drupal project has released version 4.5.1 of its open-source content management platform. Drupal 4.5.1 is a maintenance release that provides corrections of problems reported using the bug tracking system. As no critical bugs have been identified, this is a regular bug-fix release. There are no new features in this installment. For more information about the Drupal 4.5.x release series, please consult the Drupal 4.5.0 release announcement. For more information about the Drupal 4.5.1 release in particular, read on.
I'm not familiar with Plone at all. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what Python code looked like if I saw it. Zope sounds like a dark force ready to suck me into another universe. But its technological intimidation factor aside, it is the mother of all CMS software, at least from what little I've read and heard. Given that it even has some of code written in C for performance purposes, I can only assume that Plone is an industrial, heavy-duty CMS system.
As the Drupal community has grown the rate of forum and mailing list traffic has increased, making it difficult keep on top of all the recent developments in Drupal land. In an attempt to address this problem, I wrote a status report about the ongoing work. Read on.
I wrote a simple contact module and installed it here on drupal.org. The module lets people contact each other via e-mail without giving away the recepient's e-mail address. Note that this feature is only available to registered users. As can be seen, each user's profile page now has a 'contact'-tab. The actual contact form will only be present if the user has chosen to accept e-mails sent through drupal.org. This feature is disabled by default and can be enabled by checking the Personal contact form checkbox on your account's settings page.
