Welcome to the Winter 2005/06 edition of the Drupal newsletter! We've switched our release cycle to quarterly now, but with enough content from the community, we'd happily put it back to monthly!
There has been some exciting activity in the Drupal community over the past few months, including 4 beta releases of 4.7, a bounty for a GPL'ed phpbb->Drupal converter, Drupal's fifth birthday (and a cake to match) and a great bugfix party!
But don't let me bore you down with excitement, dig right on in...
NowPublic.com, a Drupal powered citizen journalism site, rolled out version 3 this week. As with V1 and 2 we are building all the functionality of the newsroom into tools that are free for anyone to use. The idea being that through collaboration, writers/bloggers, photographers and editors can all make contributions to the news. The result is news built by the people, more closely representing our interests. Anyone can post what they’re reading (like digg or newsvine), file written stories (like a blogging tool) or upload photos (i.e. flickr), audio and videos (as with youtube).
Our beloved Druplicon has been found on many places; on t-shirts, on posters, on book covers, on magazine covers and on flyers. But seldom has our small hero left the paperworld to enter "The Real World". This cool clock was one of the first physical Druplicons I saw, followed by the famous birthday cake. So it made me wonder: why are there so many true Drupal lovers yet not that many real Druplicons? Don’t we Drupalaars like our icon? No, we do! And we need more Druplicons!
Asking around on IRC and mailing people, revealed that lots of people would love to have a Druplicon on their desk, in their car or in their wallet. So here it goes: create a cool physical Druplicon and post a (link to the) picture in a comment. It might be a real pumpkin Drupal style, it might be a Druplicon made of paper in orgami. Or you might want to build a giant Druplicon out of lego like this tux (and buy lots of blue pieces). You could also create a pattern to stich your own Druplicon and have a fluffy beanbag on your desk. I ordered a custom pass from a local bank so I can carry Druplicon in my wallet. Now it is time for you to get creative and create the best Druplicon you can!
Just in time for DrupalCon 2006, Vancouver, the Drupal development team is pleased to announce the fourth beta release of Drupal 4.7.0! It is available for immediate download at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-beta4.tar.gz. This beta release is hopefully the final beta release for Drupal 4.7.0 and marks a significant improvement in the Drupal 4.7.0 codebase. Since beta 3, over 120 bugs have been fixed, bringing the total to nearly 300 bugs fixed since the first beta release. All of these changes are detailed in the changelog. However, there are still more bugs to be found, reported and fixed before a release candidate can be made. The good news is that, with your help, we can release Drupal 4.7.0 RC1 much sooner!
