Drupal 6 Panels Cookbook, by Bhavin (Vin) Patel, a newly-published title from Packt Publishing, is a collection of simple useful recipes that gives a very clear understanding from the basics of Panels to complex implementations to generate Web 2.0 layouts.

It begins with the basics and gradually delves deeper into the complexities of Panels. You will learn how to set up CTools and Panels, upgrade from Panels 2 to Panels 3, about page layout, theming, and lots more. The layout of the book is a series of interconnected but distinct recipes that gives a basic understanding of usage of Panels in Drupal and also the advanced settings that makes Panels one of the most powerful modules. You will learn to master the Panels user interface and theme each panel quickly with a series of practical recipes. You will be able to integrate powerful Drupal modules like Organic Views, Advanced Profile Kit, Views, CCK, and many more to create socially connected Web 2.0 websites.

As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 20% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

The fast-changing world of modern journalism demands an innovative new web publishing platform that can push the boundaries of news reporting on the Internet. Using Drupal, the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California (USC) has built the Annenberg Social News Platform (ASNP), designed specifically for the news publishing needs of tomorrow. The first news site built using the ASNP is Neon Tommy. USC Annenberg is widely recognized in the communications industry as a center for discussion among scholars and professionals in journalism, communication, public policy, media, and education. Annenberg's selection of Drupal as the chosen CMS platform upon which to build a model social news system is a testimonial to Drupal's stability and power.

Following the success of its predecessor, Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, Packt Publishing announces Drupal 7, an updated and revised version of the original book by David Mercer written specifically for Drupal 7. The book is written for Drupal 7 beginners or newcomers to Drupal in general and will help help anyone to create and operate any type of website quickly and efficiently.

This book provides a great way to learn and master Drupal 7, enabling you to create virtually any type of website. It meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to design and build sites like a pro. By clearly and concisely demonstrating the fundamentals of Drupal in combination with practical and methodical coverage of more advanced subjects, this book paves the way for anyone to quickly become proficient at building and operating professional websites.

150 quiz questions and exercises will help you to consolidate and expand on what you learn in the book.

Drupal.org readers are also entitled to a 20% promotional discount when ordering through Packt. Make sure you provide the discount code (Drupal7book20) upon purchase to receive the discount.

Remember that, as with all Packt books, a percentage of the revenue from each book sold will go to support the open source technology on which the book is based - in this case, the proceeds will benefit the Drupal Association.

The Creating Communities Web site has been created for the Denver Public Library using Drupal and extended by the Zen theme engine, Apache Solr Search Integration and the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Drupal Toolkit.

Recently, Drupal has been strongly embraced at the Denver Public Library becoming the official CMS of choice. Other Colorado Libraries are also making serious commitments to Drupal because of its flexibility, support for XML, taxonomy, low cost of ownership and a great community that provides many modules that support library ambitions with actual working code.

The Western History & Genealogy Department, in partnership with the City of Denver, History Colorado, Auraria Library, and University of Denver Penrose Library has brought together a number of historic resources and digitized archival materials. The project is funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

We encourage you all to explore the site and learn more about the history of Denver.

Update: Drupal 7.0 Beta 1 is available now!

Our last Drupal 7 alpha version was released about two months ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the seventh (and hopefully final) alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes:

• HUGE number of upgrade path fixes, including automated tests for updates. We are *very* close to a totally working upgrade path! Please test!
• Great usability improvements, including the installer not greeting you with a red error of death anymore on shared hosts!
• Field UI improvements to allow it to be further extended from contrib.
• Numerous Form API fixes and improvements.
• Numerous accessibility fixes.
• A variety of PostgreSQL and SQLite fixes, almost at 100% automated tests passing on both!
• Lots of polish on coding standards compliance and API documentation.
• Markup improvements, and a new default jQuery UI theme.
• Numerous security fixes, including 'forward-ports' of Drupal core SAs, and fixes to private files.
• Performance improvements.
• There have been several API changes since alpha6 to fix critical issues. These are broadcast to the development mailing list by Randy Fay.

When will alpha become beta?

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta within the next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

Yourpublicmedia.org is a curated news and arts portal built by the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network (CPBN) that is dedicated to promoting high quality, local/regional content that is created by non-profit organizations from around Connecticut including: Connecticut Public Broadcasting (CPTV/WNPR) and a number of community partners including the Connecticut Historical Society, the CT Mirror (an independent, Knight-funded news organization), the New Haven Independent (a hyper-local news site), and Fairfield University. We are continuously working to secure additional content partners.

The idea that this site would consist of a curated experience was a very important one to us during the concept and design phase - the two national entities that we (CPBN) are associated with are PBS and NPR; two brands that have a long history and reputation for providing such content curation. We didn't want to simply turn this into a river-of-news-type site, and we recognized that neither our internal staff's capacity, nor the capacity of the non-profit groups we would be working with, would be able to add any meaningful value on this front with the for-profit local news agencies already working hard in this area, and auto-aggregated services like news.google.com providing incredibly useful resources to people looking for up-to-the-minute (breaking news) information.

Instead, we chose to leverage the longer-form coverage and focus on more in depth analysis that we consider a core competency, rather than the sort of coverage typically achieved within the breaking-news context.