On Tuesday, February 17, 2009, the Drupal Association General Assembly held its third election. The Drupal Association elected both new permanent members to the Drupal Association, and a new Board of Directors.

There were 27 candidates who submitted applications to the Drupal Association, which includes existing members re-applying for board positions in 2009. Of those, we elected six new members as permanent members, and a board consisting of eight individuals.

Specific vote results are itemized below the break.

The Trinidad Guardian, one of 3 popular newspapers in Trinidad, re-launched their website on New Years Day 2009 using Drupal 5. The site has a simple design done by their in-house graphics designer Ms. Maxie Navarro. The Drupal developer behind it, Shivan Jaikaran, would like to share his techniques as a tech case study.

Why was Drupal chosen?

The old site was a plain html site and did not provide much (if any) flexibility in terms of multiple updates, RSS, scheduled workflow or fostering a community website with features such as comments. Drupal was decided upon internally as the CMS of choice to overcome such drawbacks. It was imperative that the editors be allowed to update the site simultaneously, remotely and without much programming skills....features that were not possible with the old site.

The Homepage

Great news! On Thursday evening, the Drupal Association board chose Paris to host the next European Drupalcon.

First of all we want to congratulate the teams from the other two candidate cities, Maastricht and Cologne. We know they worked hard, spent a lot of energy and did a great job. We're looking forward to working with you all — your help and experience will be more than welcome...

Paris is a good city for open source software, a great city for Drupal and, frankly, a fantastic place to visit. The community here has become increasingly active over the past two years and is excited to host enthusiastic Drupalers from around the world.

We want the conference to be attractive to as many Drupalers as possible. This is why the conference will feature tracks for coders, designers, site builders and students as well as companies and entrepreneurs thinking about using Drupal.

Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions is a step-by-step guide to building your business website in Drupal, complete with a blog, events calendar, catalogue of products and services, and more. As always, Packt Publishing will be donating a percentage of all book sales directly to the Drupal Association.

Author Mark Noble will show you how to build a complete website for a fictional client from scratch. He starts at the beginning by downloading and installing Drupal, progressing to creating and editing pages, through to exploring the most popular modules for Drupal. All functionality is presented in a clear step-by-step format which is easy to follow as you build your own site.

This book explores several modules that will allow you to do everything from adding calendars and events to integrating content from Flickr and YouTube. Each chapter adds some features to your website that will bring you closer to your customers.

At the end of the book, you should be able to build a site on your own. If you are new to Drupal this book will give you the confidence and knowledge to hire a professional to develop a site for you which meets your business needs. Regardless of whether you build your own, or work with a professional Drupal developer, this book will help you to develop a site that connects you to your customers and will find ways to make you more money.

This week, twelve of us have gathered in Paris to continue our work on upgrading drupal.org. Sprinters include: Joeri Poesen, Damien Tournoud, Neil Drumm, Mike O'Conner, Gerhard Killesreiter, Klaas Van Waesberghe, Todd Ross Nienkerk, Aaron Stanush, David Stosik, Morten Heide, Gábor Hojtsy and myself. Upgrading and redesigning drupal.org is a big project, and, when implemented, will be an important milestone for our community. We're hopeful that we can push the drupal.org redesign closer to completion this week.

This week in Paris, our group is split into two teams. One group will implement the new theme designed by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt with the involvement of many people in our community. The second group will continue where we left off in Boston and will also start implementing some of the new functionality planned for the new drupal.org (e.g. better search, improved project pages, better landing pages, a jobs page, an events page, and more).

In October 2008, NuMedia Advantage launched the new Just Racing UK website, a racing and Triathlon (running, cycling and swimming) event management website. The build process was relatively complicated, involving a lot of modules, some of which were dropped, some of which worked right out the box, and some of which required a good degree of hacking and customisation.

Requirements

Just Racing's first website was created by a different design company and offered the visitor the ability to view up and coming race events, and book races electronically through a third party. As well as bulking out the process for the visitor, Just Racing incurred very high processing fees.

We were asked to take inspiration from the exiting site, but add the ability to: -

• Promote and Process events
• Offer payment processing online
• Vary sponsorships
• Create and manage online start-lists (based upon age and swim-times)
• Display previous years race results
• Manage race-specific newsletter subscriptions
• Utilise an existing database

It went without saying, but a fresh new look was also required.