It is that time of the year again! After predictions for 2004 and 2005, we continue this tradition about what Drupal will do in 2006.

Looking back to the predictions for 2005, it seems that some predictions were far from right, if serious at all. Some posters, however, turned out to be true fortune tellers...

Big news folks- CivicSpace Labs has just helped a major new eCommerce company launch this week using on CivicSpace/Drupal, at http://www.GoodStorm.com. We think this is going to be one of the highest traffic CivicSpace sites ever launched, and it's already yielding a lot of new useful Drupal code(organic group stores, e-commerce products, sub-products, apparel, paypal pro, e-civicrm).

GoodStorm is explicitly aimed at helping non-profit organization earn income to support their work through merchandising-- which is to say that it provides production, online sales, and fulfillment of printed branded apparel as an online service. We think that where CivicSpace helps to provide online tools to organizations, GoodStorm will help the organizations help themselves to become financially sustainable.

Drupal 4.7.0 beta 2 is now available for download at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-beta2.tar.gz. This is the second beta release of the forthcoming Drupal 4.7.0 release.

Over 50 bugs have been fixed since beta 1, but we know there are still more to find, report, and fix. Being a community, this is a community effort and we need as much of the community as we can get to come forward and help us out so that we can get this system to a stable 4.7.0 release. Read on for more information about how you can help.

On Saturday, December 17 at 18:00GMT (noon eastern time US, 7pm central european time), I will be welcoming the whole Drupal community to a Bug Fixing party. Even if you can't attend at that time, you can still help out. See below.

We are determined to make 4.7 our most powerful, and least buggy release to date. Almost everyone can contribute in one way or another. Our party is coordinated via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Meet fellow Drupalites in the room entitled #drupal-bugfix on the server chat.freenode.net. If you are unfamilar with IRC, you will need to download an IRC client application to your PC.

We owe a lot to Tim Berners-Lee, whether you know him or not. In short, he is the father of the World Wide Web and the creator of the very first web site. Recently, as part of MIT's Decentralized Information Group's web site, he published his first blog entry with honest-to-goodness "blogging tools", explaining that:

All Drupal developers should plan to make their way to the west coast of Canada for the event to kick off your year: the Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon. As the event page says, this will be a developer-centric event focused on collaborating together on future directions and everyone's favourite topic -- APIs!

There will likely be some time for relaxing as well, with skiing being excellent that time of year on Vancouver's coastal mountains or even up at Whistler, for some of the best mountains in the world.

Chad Phillips and Angie Byron are the two main Drupal organizers, with Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao doing the Vancouver local organizing and helping with the summit as a whole. Please join the Drupal conference mailing list and/or check out the wiki to add your own ideas to make this a great gathering of Drupalites. Oh, and of course, flip the switch in your user profile to get listed on the attendees page.