Packt Publishing has announced its first ever Author of the Year award. The award will be given to the author or authors of one book published by Packt in 2008.

Packt is aggressively promoting Drupal by publishing numerous books, and 2008 was clearly a watershed year for Drupal books. Here's a list of Drupal books and authors that are eligible for the award (in the order Packt's search engine returned them):

• Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn
• Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald
• Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher
• Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves
• Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble
• Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer

Packt is asking the community to vote for their favorite authors. The top four authors' works will be submitted to a panel of judges who will select the winner.

Go vote and show Packt that their Drupal emphasis is appreciated.

Prentice Hall has just released Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6 and its new theme engine. Emma Jane and Konstantin cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates. They show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of its powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management and build more portable and flexible themes. Also included are several case studies that walk thru the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forms.

There are only a few months left before the code freeze on September 1st. Now that Fields API has settled in core, it's time to extend it with some RDF semantics. DERI Galway is hosting an RDF in Drupal code sprint from May 11th until May 14th.

This sprint builds on Dries' ideas expressed in his recent posts Drupal, the semantic web and search and RDFa and Drupal. With RDF in the core of Drupal and RDFa output by default, it's dozens of thousands of websites which will all of a sudden start publishing their data as RDF.

So far, Stéphane Corlosquet, Florian Loretan, Benjamin Melançon and Rolf Guescini have signed up. How about you?

Some others are willing to come but cannot afford the trip until some funding is secured. To help us fund the sprint and bring more Drupal rockstars on board, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. The money will be used to cover flight, food and hotel costs for the sprinters. All sprinters are generously donating their time to make this happen. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive testing and Fields experience. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or will be donated to the Drupal Association.

Have you been looking for an excuse to play around a bit with Drupal 7, and have an interest in helping to directly shape it? Would you like to not only see how Drupal core contributors collaborate together, but become one yourself? Do you have an itch you'd like scratched and are willing to help scratch others' in return? Would you like to be exposed to new and interesting areas of Drupal you might not have otherwise experienced? Are you exceptionally good at finding faults and breaking things?

If so, drop by #drupal-dev on irc.freenode.net on Saturday (May 16) for a patch review sprint! (What is a patch review sprint? / How to connect to IRC?) While somewhat informal, there will be people around all weekend to help get new patch reviewers started and to help guide seasoned contributors to important patches.

Our goal is to try and knock the core patches to review queue down to zero (or as close to it as possible) by trying out patches to see how they work, and recommending ways that they can be improved. The Patch review sprints page has more information on how patch reviews work, a handy cheat-sheet of all the commands you need, and a list of prerequisites in order to participate.

Please note that "coding skills" is not on the list of prerequisites. While people with coding skills can perform certain types of reviews better than non-coders, non-coders can also perform certain types of reviews better than coders. In short: everyone is welcome!

Hope to see you there! :)

The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards were recently announced, and they include a number of sites built in Drupal! Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. It’s like the Oscars for websites.

In addition to the juried awards, which are decided by a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein, all nominees are also eligible to win a Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community.

This is where you come in! From now until April 30th, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com – this is a great opportunity for the community to come out, show their support, and get out the word that some of the best sites in the world are powered by Drupal. We’ve created a list of all the known Drupal sites sorted by the category in which they were nominated below; please let us know in the comments if we’ve missed any.

Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 8th hosted by Seth Meyers.