Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal outside of education as well.

One mom's mission to create a safe online space for teens

Yoursphere.com is a safe kids-only social network (built with Drupal 5), which is complemented by an online safety blog and discussion site, internet-safety.yoursphere.com (built with Acquia Drupal).

Founder Mary Kay Hoal is a savvy mother of five. When her children started spending time on social network sites such as MySpace she did a little research and was shocked to find that social networks were magnets for sexual predators and rampant with inappropriate content targeting youth. "We wouldn't open our front door and invite 29,000 registered sex offenders into the house," Mary Kay told her kids, "so why should we accept that online?"

So she banned social networking from her home and saw her approval rating dip below that of steamed broccoli. Besides being unpopular at home, Mary Kay also knew that trying to banish MySpace would be a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. She really had no choice -- it was her duty as a mom to create a safe alternative.

While many people say that theming is one of the better organized topics in Drupal's documentation, many have expressed frustration that relevant pages are located in a variety of different branches, and even separate handbooks. The documentation team has also decided that this has created an unsustainable path for forward maintenance. Therefore, as a first step, we are going to merge nearly all theming-related information into a single Consolidated Theming Guide on Sunday, 23 November, to be located at http://drupal.org/theme-guide (currently pointing to the Drupal 6 Theme Guide). Existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible.

A theming documentation workgroup is now forming to focus on reorganizing the new book's navigation hierarchy. For further information on the project and how to join in, please visit the group's project page.

Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.

Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.

Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.

CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to provide stronger code and APIs. We've tried to respond to many of the things that were often requested but were difficult or impossible to do in the Drupal 5 version: streamline the process of creating fields, use drag-n-drop to reorganize fields and values, provide a user-friendly 'Add more' button for multiple values, give developers an API and more tools to customize CCK behavior, and provide more documentation.

Many of the things you see in the latest code would not have been possible without all the new Drupal 6 and Views 2 features. Drupal 6, CCK 2 and Views 2 make a great combination!

CCK Links

• Project page
• CCK 6.x-2.0 release notes (people upgrading from previous RCs should read this).
• Download CCK 6.x-2.0 - Fresh from the maintainers: 6.x-2.1 bugfix release

Important: This release fixes a (minor) security issue that was present in the previous RC releases.
See the Security Annoucement for more informations.