The San Francisco DrupalCon organizing committee is happy to announce that session submissions are open!

Come see the sessions that have already been proposed, and if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, suggest your own. Drupal's community is what sets it apart from the pack, so come be a part of the magic!

The session submission and voting schedule is:

• January 15, 2010 to February 15, 2010 - Session Submissions Open
• February 16, 2010 - March 1, 2010 - Public Voting on Sessions
• 
March 5, 2010 - Speakers Notified

• March 15, 2010 - Final Schedule Posted

SharkScopers is a Drupal 6 site that allows online poker instructors to sell screencast tutorial videos. The first two minutes can be viewed by anyone. Users can purchase credits that unlock whole videos. Instructors then receive a cut of the profit.

Jonathan Brown from Blue Droplet Media in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been helping Mike Jonas from SharkScope in New York develop the site for more than a year. It uses Jonathan's Blue Droplet Video module extensively.

Mike had done a lot of research into what system should be used to build the site. His primary motivation for choosing Drupal was so that Blue Droplet Video could be used. He was blown away by how BDV integrates with CCK and Views, allowing the fundamentals of the site to be created with great ease.

Jonathan and Mike have very well defined roles within the project. For each task, they consult via email and Skype to construct robust specifications. Jonathan then implements the required functionality. A release early, release often methodology is used, allowing the site to innovate rapidly.

The fantastic theme was created entirely by Mike as a Zen sub-theme.

Healing Thresholds Autism Therapy provides comprehensive therapy fact sheets, daily updates of research and news, and a global directory of autism therapists. The site has become a standard and definitive source for autism treatment information. In particular, the site provides layperson-accessible summaries of essentially all child-focused research from the last 3 years, in addition to earlier seminal papers.

The two biggest challenges of the site have been to expose all of the deep content we've authored and to monetize it. We have over 2000 carefully-written research and news summaries and user-generated content. We also have over 1000 taxonomy terms, and we've authored detailed definitions for nearly half.

Our redesign last month upgraded the three-year-old Drupal 4.7-based site to Drupal 6. More importantly, we used the flexibility of Drupal to completely re-architect how users find and interact with our content. Where previously we had separate sections of research and news, our new tabbed interface displays -- in a search engine friendly fashion -- all of the relevant content for each of over 1000 different therapy topics.

Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 2 is available now!

After nearly two years of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first alpha version of the Drupal 7.x family. This alpha includes a tremendous number of new features and new under-the-hood improvements for both users and developers.

We revamped Drupal's user interface, added key contributed modules including CCK and ImageField, introduced a new object-oriented database layer, revamped file handling capabilities, and an automated testing framework based on SimpleTest, among literally hundreds of other improvements. Drupal 7.0 alpha 1 is the collective work of over 800 core contributors.

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is an open source project developing a free virtual appliance library that pre-integrates the very best server-oriented open source software. TurnKey Linux appliances are simple, ready-to-use servers that are designed to "just work" and can be deployed in minutes on a virtual machine, bare metal or in the cloud.

The purpose of this case study is to discuss our experience using Drupal to implement TurnKey's web site.

Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours helps you get up to speed with Drupal quickly. Whether you're starting from scratch or working to fill in some gaps in your Drupal knowledge, you'll find descriptions, examples, and Try It Yourself numbered steps to walk you through working with Drupal.

This book introduces you to Drupal and to major components ranging from the basics (overall design, themes, administration, security, and the like) as well as modules that are distributed with Drupal itself along with contributed modules that enhance your site. Each chapter is focused on a single task so that you can jump around according to your needs.