Szeged city view from the Tisza river

At this year's Drupalcon we're turning Szeged, Hungary into Drupaltown!

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Szeged, Hungary from August 27 to 30, 2008 in the Library and Conference Center of the Szeged University. With a thousand Drupal enthusiasts expected we'll be turning this picturesque student city into a true Drupaltown!

Drupalcon has been a major success for the Drupal community, with every conference reaching out to more and more people. Like Boston, Drupalcon Szeged will again provide ample opportunities both for business people, developers, themers, designers, and users in the community: there will be a code sprint, plenty of space for BOF sessions, a job fair and, of course, plenty of opportunity for networking. Start planning, buy your tickets early and be prepared to meet your Drupal community in Szeged, Hungary; Drupaltown!

Given the success of David Mercer's first Drupal title for beginners, Packt has published a new and improved edition to go with the latest release of Drupal. The new book, still targetted at beginners and intermediates, builds on its predecessor to provide a steeper launching ramp for everyone who still feels they're not yet a pro.

Changes to the new version include:

• Slimmed down writing, to provide faster flowing and more concentrated information
• Updates to all the original text to reflect the enhanced features of D6
• Vastly expanded the range of topics
• Increased the depth and level of coverage for many topics

Despite the fact that I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained, the new version is over 330 pages. This gives you an idea of how much new material went into this edition in order to bring it up to speed with this most impressive of Drupal releases. This new book is as much an overhaul of the last as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

I hope that this title will meet the following goals that I have personally set for it:

1. To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club

Myplay.com is a redesign and re-branding of Sony's Musicbox site which showcases SonyBMG's artists, providing free access to their videos, music and photos. Users can create lists of their favorite artists as well as review their music and embed widgets of their favorite artist's content into other sites. Sony Musicbox was originally implemented by the Lullabots who provided the base framework for this redesign. Thanks to their diligence and teaching as well as excellent tools provided by Earl Miles (Panels 2, Views and Nodequeue), three people (Suzi Arnold, Jerad Bitner and David Burns) were able to accomplish this task in just over a month.

This case study documents how the site is put together, and provides implementation details on how we've combined numerous important contributed modules to build a "next generation" Drupal site.

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

If you're interested in learning more about how Mollom works, check out the 'How Mollom works' page and visit the Mollom FAQs for more details.