Founded in 1991, The Cara Program is a Chicago-based non-profit that empowers men and women affected by homelessness and poverty with the skills, confidence and resources to secure and sustain quality jobs and achieve long-term success. Since their founding, they have placed more than 2,500 individuals into full-time, rewarding positions with leading Chicago area companies such as ABM Lakeside, The Hilton Hotels, JP Morgan Chase, Sodexho, and more.

The Cara Program sought a redesign of their static website, one that engaged visitors by quickly delivering key information that was clear and concise, and could be easily maintained by Cara staff. Being a non-profit website, they also needed a way to accept donations, recruit volunteers, allow visitors to join their mailing list, and recruit sponsors and employment partners. In addition to being able to simply accept donations, they wanted to eventually “empower” donors to use social media and/or other outlets to spread the word, champion their cause and help others donate or otherwise support. The ability to share some content also needed to be a feature on The Cara Program "child" program websites: Clean Slate, Quad Communities and Career Pathways.

Duo Consulting was chosen to implement their goals and Drupal was the platform chosen.

It's time for another update from DrupalCon Copenhagen! This time around we have updated information on the core developer summit, the unconference, and the code sprint.

Official Program

First of all, we are happy to announce that the final version of the program is now available on the site. The few remaining slots in the schedule will be used for sponsor sessions and lightning talks. We'll try to keep schedule changes to a minimum, but if we do have to shuffle a few sessions around, this is the page to watch. Also, we'll make the entire program available as a PDF if you would rather keep it on your laptop or print a copy to keep in your pocket during the conference.

Now that the program has been finished, you can start planning your DrupalCon Copenhagen. Go to the session schedule and add all your favorite sessions to your personal schedule. You can see a list of your chosen sessions by going to your user profile and clicking the "My schedule" link.

Core Developer Summit

If you're in Copenhagen on Sunday, August 22nd, and interested in helping improve Drupal core, you should participate in the Core Developer Summit. The summit will provide opportunities both for people to discuss changes to Drupal code and processes as well as people interested to move Drupal 7 closer to release. The summit will start wit three shorts sessions by Dries Buytaert, Sam Boyer, and Jen Simmons. After the kick-off sessions, the summit will break up into two groups, with plenty of space to be fruitful and get stuff done. All ideas are welcome!

Drupal 6.18 and 5.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 6.19 also fixes other small issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in the Drupal 5.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 will no longer be maintained when Drupal 7 is released. Upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

This post is part of a series to inform the Drupal community about the drupal.org redesign project, and the work the Drupal Association is funding to help get the redesign completed. If you would like to contribute to the redesign as a volunteer, see the community initiatives redesign page. If you'd like to contribute to the redesign financially, see the Drupal Association memberships and donations pages.

With Drupal 7 down to 30 critical bugs, and Drupalcon Copenhagen just around the corner, it's only a matter of time before Drupal 7.0 ships. We want to make sure our Drupal 7 documentation is in great shape for this fantastic new release, and the Documentation Team could really use YOUR help getting there!

PulpMX.com was launched in early 2009 as a place for well-known motocross columnist Steve Matthes to post his musings about the sport and its history. Originally conceived of as a modest site, it was built in early 2009 using a stock theme with a handful of custom images, the FCKeditor and IMCE modules to provide a built-in visual editor, and little else. Over time it had grown organically as needs developed: CCK, Filefield, and SWF Tools for posting audio interviews in a built-in player, for example. In early 2010 PulpMX also took on discussion forums from a site that was no longer able to host them, so an existing phpBB installation was also imported.

The site was developing a growing following and it was becoming obvious that it needed an overhaul to better reflect the character of the site, and provide more cohesive and initiative navigation among the quickly expanding areas of the site. Says Steve:

Originally I had gotten Tooth and Nail to design me a basic site for blogs and photos, what they gave me was way better than I had thought I needed. The traffic and the new media things that I was doing (podcasts, slide shows and a live internet show) demanded that I get something new and fresh. I was now big-time I suppose.