Earlier today, Google announced their list of selected Google Summer of Code 2008 mentoring organizations, and we are pleased to inform the community that we have been selected once again. This will mark the Drupal project's fourth year of participation in this important program, which provides a great opportunity for the Drupal community to bring in talented new contributors, award existing long-term contributors, and get some exciting new coding projects done at the same time! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code FAQ and program timeline.

Some of Drupal's Summer of Code success stories include:

	Aron Novak, a two-time Summer of Code return champion who has done tremendous work on the FeedAPI module and now works for Development Seed.		Fabiano Sant'Ana (wundo), who maintains the widely-used CAPTCHA module recently started the first Brazilian Drupal shop.
	Rok Žlender, whose success on the SimpleTest automator led him to be one of those at the forefront of our efforts to integrate unit testing into core. He works full-time with Drupal at NowPublic.		Konstantin Käfer, also with NowPublic, continues to churn out great jQuery-enabled modules and important JavaScript core patches for Drupal.
	Angela Byron (webchick) who is now a consultant for high-profile Drupal websites with Lullabot and is on the board of directors for the Drupal Association.		Gábor Hojtsy, an existing Drupal contributor who was able to spend the summer doing extremely important work on i18n in Drupal core and tools for translators, and now spends his days as an engineer for Acquia.

So if you're:

• a post-secondary student looking for an exciting project with a thriving development community and tons of smart people you can work with
• an existing Drupal contributor who happens to be in college/university and would love a chance to get paid over the summer to work on the Next Big Drupal Thing
• a seasoned Drupal developer with some time over the summer, who'd truly enjoy mentoring and helping the next generation of contributors make Drupal the best that it can be
• a Drupal community member who might not have the time or coding experience to mentor, but knows where to find resources and enjoys helping others find them
• someone with a great project idea for an improvement in Drupal that would be perfect for a student to work on over the summer

...then there's something for you in Summer of Code! Read on to find out more. :)

DrupalCon just finished wrapping up and it has been an amazing week. Over 900 people attended over 50 sessions and over 30 Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions. In the rooms and halls you could see knowledge virally spreading throughout the attendees as well as connections being made. DrupalCon may be over but don't let the knowledge sharing stop. Attend, Host, Create a local event to get this momentum going!

Here are a few great events coming up!

Sydney, Australia May 18th-22nd, 2008
Drupal Asia/Pacific Conference. The first major Drupal conference in Australia teamed up with CeBit.

Austin, Texas March 8th, 2008
BarCamp with Much Drupal love

Orlando, Florida April 5th-6th, 2008
Barcamp with much Drupal love

Paris, France April 19th
DrupalCamp2!

*UPDATE* - This event's details have changed and has been postponed to a
new date. Please visit http://drupalapc.org for more details
The Australian Drupal community is pleased to announce that they will be holding their next large event in Sydney, Australia from May 18th – 22nd 2008 at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Center Darling Harbor in conjunction with the Open CeBIT expo and conference.

The Drupal Asia Pacific Conference is a major event to gather Drupalers to learn, discuss and advance Drupal. It is also a great opportunity to network with other community members that operate in the Asia Pacific region and who may not be able to attend community events on the other side of the world.

The conference will feature dual tracks over 3 days and a single theatre over a day and half that will also be open to the broader Open CeBIT audience. We are partnering with the Joomla community to host a website building contest which will be prominently highlighted at the OpenCeBIT Conference. All attendees will be provided free entry to the CeBIT expo (20th – 22nd) and offered discounted tickets to the Open CeBIT conference. We will also be hosting a booth as part of the CeBIT Exhibition to educate and promote Drupal to businesses, government, and individual attendees of the exhibition.

Drupal 6.1, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

The recent explosion of social networking sites has led to a rush to tap into new markets. A case in point at ISL (Insight + Strategy + Logic) is Red Room, an online community for writers of all stripes. The project is the brainchild of entrepreneur Ivory Madison. The goal of the site is to be the premier destination for authors to congregate with fans and discuss their books and ideas. Many high profile authors including Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini and Salman Rushdie have been on the site since day one.

While the Web has plenty of sites on which you can buy books, there is a paucity of places geared toward building dialogue about the books beyond what is necessary to move product. On many book-related sites, the authors themselves have largely been left out of the picture, leaving them to either establish their own limited Web presence or do without. This is a shame when you consider what could be on a good author website — who better to blog than someone that makes a living spinning a good tale? Red Room offers every author the opportunity to easily build a presence to interact with their readers and with each other.

The client came at us with a list of features: blogging, comments and reviews, biographies, information about published works, event listings, streaming video, and podcasts. They required a robust, moderated, and extensible backend, with tagging and search tools to allow the user to navigate the large volume of content that thousands of writers would pump into the site. Most importantly, the site’s content generation tools needed to be easy to use by authors that wouldn’t necessarily have experience using technology.

Letter from the Editor

We've all been waiting for it! After a year of development, Drupal 6 has finally been released. The general consensus among developers is that once CCK (nearly done) and Views (in progress) are complete, it will be ready for deployment on most sites. A large number of contributed modules depend on these two workhorses, which is why large chunks of CCK have been moved to core, and there is ongoing discussion around moving parts of Views there as well. Meanwhile, with Drupal 6 off their plates, developers are working around the clock to get your favorite modules ready for launch.

Boston DrupalCon is also around the corner. It would probably be enticing enough to attend just to hear Dries Buytaert's highly anticipated State of Drupal address (see last year's). But we have three stellar keynote speakers (Dries Buytaert, the original developer of Drupal; Chris Dibona, the open source program manager at Google; and Brian Aker, the director of architecture for MySQL) this year, and dozens of amazing presentations to choose from to create a rock solid line up.

With nearly a hundred volunteers, the Drupal Newsletter Team is committing itself to continue to bring high quality news and announcements from the world of Drupal. I have recently stepped up as an editor to help organize the effort, and we invite you to be part of this fantastic and dynamic group. March's newsletter is already in progress, so if you want to help contribute to that issue or join on an on-going basis, feel free to join us. We'd love to see your name in the bylines. As a sidenote, the Newsletter Team is also looking for a Druplicon mascot. We have a competition open at http://groups.drupal.org/node/8442, for any aspiring artists!