Come play with your local Drupal user group and take part in the battle of the groups, as DUGs* from China to Egypt to Vancouver fight to the finish for fame and honor. Help organize a local meeting to test the latest development branch of Drupal, review patches, and get those last pesky quirks fixed. Leave your mark by writing "This bug squashed by the East Kankakee Drupal marauders... RTBC!" in the issues you review and the bugs you fix. You know your group is the BEST, now go prove it! And have fun. =)

Over at Drupalbasics.com there are a couple of podcasts on how to configure Drupal and what's new in the upcomming Drupal 5 version. It is very easy to listen to and aims at the beginner site administrator. But even if you are a hardcore core contributor, it might be worth checking out to find out how others see and appreciate your work.

Packt Publishing has announced the winners of their 2006 Open Source CMS Award, and Drupal has been awarded second place. The award comes with a cash prize of $3,000. The Joomla! project took first place, with Plone coming in third.

When the voting ended, Joomla! and Drupal were in a tie. The rules of the competition mandated that a further judge be brought in to cast the tie-breaking vote.

After months of design, implementation, and testing, the initial version of the new system for releasing Drupal contributions is finally installed and running on drupal.org. This change impacts everyone who uses or maintains contributions (modules, themes, etc) from drupal.org. Contributions have a new version number scheme, and at long last, official releases.

I was asked to provide some info on how I updated Tagadelic for use at my 5.0 site, and I thought the information might prove useful to others who are maybe new to the whole process. Basically, it involves looking in the handbook for the new changes and then scanning the code to make them! Simple enough on a small module like Tagadelic, but it can be quite a task for larger projects like e-commerce.

Check out the article and let me know if I left any holes or made any mistakes. I won't put that past me, especially after midnight. ;)

Join us for our first Iowa Drupal Meetup (or Drupal-corn, if you will) in the Skybox at Legends on Thursday, November 16. We plan to eat at 6 pm and begin informal presentations around 7:30 pm. You are welcome to wander in at any time. The event is being organized by Lullabot. RSVP to Matt Westgate.