There are 9 days left to submit your session proposal for DrupalCon London 2011, which will be held August 22-26, 2011 at the Fairfield Halls in South London. This is your chance to share your knowledge and experiences with DrupalCon attendees. Deadline for session submissions is 15th May, 2011 at 11:59 GMT+1.

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 20 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2011. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are investing over $110,000 in the Drupal project.

During the Drupal 7 release cycle we had two usability tests, one at the University of Minnesota and one at the University of Baltimore. These tests helped us understand the fundamental issues that Drupal site-builders face and set the direction for many of the major usability improvements in Drupal 7. These tests also triggered a cultural shift within the Drupal contributor community: we now consider user experience design a top priority in all major development efforts.

As the next step in this effort, we are running new usability tests to inform Drupal 8 development!

From May 17-19, the University of Minnesota has once again offered to host a formal usability test in their lab facilities, this time targeting Drupal 8 (as well as Drupal 7 contrib). These tests will give us the chance to see how far we’ve come in solving issues we identified previously. They will also give us a chance to evaluate the new interfaces and tools we added to Drupal 7 core, including the Overlay, Contextual Links, and Toolbar modules.

Brands are increasingly turning to brand ambassadors to market their products. Ambassadors are individuals with credibility in a given area who are hired by a brand to introduce consumers to a given product and educate them about its advantages.

Liquor companies, for example, often hire bartenders as brand ambassadors. The bartenders / brand ambassadors then tell their customers about the company’s brand of gin, and train other bartenders in making signature cocktails with that gin.

Brand ambassadors provide companies and products with valuable credibility. Wouldn’t you trust a liquor recommendation that came from a bartender over one that came from a salesperson?

The downside is logistics. Creating a regional or national team of brand ambassadors requires big investments in recruitment, training and management.

With Drupal however, you can create an online system that helps recruit, manage and monitor brand ambassadors with much less investment.

This project was another collaboration between design and development shop ISL Consulting in San Francisco, and ClearMetrics digital agency in New York.

Hello from Jennifer and Ariane, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team co-leads! It’s time for another quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation Team—a lot has been going on since our last update (December 24, 2010), and we’d like to take this time to review the past quarter, talk a bit about the future, and let you know how to get involved! (Be sure not to miss the info at the very end about the April 2011 month-long documentation sprint priorities!)

Long-term goals and vision

People have been asking us about the long-term goals and vision of the Documentation Team lately. We’ve outlined some goals for the next year or so, but as of yet, we haven’t really articulated anything out farther than that. Rest assured, we will be thinking about longer-term goals and vision soon, but as new Documentation Team leads, we are currently still trying to get the basics taken care of and assess where we are and what resources we have for changing directions. That said, we do have some overarching goals:

• Make the documentation more complete and more accurate.
• Make it easier for users of all levels to navigate the documentation.
• Facilitate documentation work, so more people can help and those who are already helping want to continue.

We are thrilled to announce that for the seventh year in a row, Drupal has been selected for the Google Summer of Code program!

Drupal uses this great opportunity to expand its family with new talented contributors and award its existing long-term contributors. This fantastic program also gets Drupal some amazing new coding projects done! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code website and program timeline.