Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link.

UPDATE: Huge congratulations to our GHOP equally-as-awesome winners! Read about it on the Google Open Source Blog!

Also see the official GHOP grand prize winners announcement.

The GHOP contest officially ended on February 4, 2008. This contest was an absolutely amazing success, and resulted in a number of new contributors to the Drupal project. If you're interested in learning more about the contest, there was a recent Lullabot podcast about GHOP, and there will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months, and would like to talk to a few of the students face-to-face.

• Peter Cawley (Corsix) was selected as Drupal's GHOP grand prize winner, and will receive a paid travel to Google campus in Mountain View, California in early May, along with the GHOP winners from other projects. Peter completed a whopping 15 tasks, his greatest accomplishment being the creation of the awesome new Flexifilter module, which allows site builders to create custom input filters without having to write code and/or install a new module for each new filter. This module was envisioned by fellow GHOP student cwgordon7, and mentored by a Drupal contributor too young to take part in GHOP, dmitrig01. Way to go, Corsix!!! :D
• Peter will be accompanied on his trip to Google by Adam Light (aclight), who did a tremendous job handling the administration of the GHOP contest, as well as helping students and mentors alike with GHOP tasks.
• We'd also like to extend our congratulations to everyone who participated, including our equally-as-awesome winners, Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7), Edward Z. Yang (ezyang), Jimmy Berry (boombatower), Wilson Lee (kourge), and Dmitri G. (dmitrig01) (who was too young to participate in GHOP, but helped a lot with mentoring and administration, and so was named honorary winner :)).
• A total of 130 tasks were completed, ranging from new and upgraded modules, enhancements to existing modules, much-needed documentation, helpful videocasts, beautiful marketing materials, and more. Almost half of those were completed during the last month of the program.
• We had a total of 54 awesome student participants during the course of GHOP, of which 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest. Amazing!
• The leaders in terms of raw task numbers were Corsix (15), boombatower (12), ezyang (10), cwgordon7 (9), and kourge (9), but we also benefited from several students who took on only a few tasks and knocked them out of the park. Most of our GHOP students are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community. :)
• Thanks to everyone for all of the great community support we've received during this contest! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

What comes next, now that GHOP is over? DROP! Read on to find out more, and also to see a list of the tasks completed since our last status report.

The release of Drupal 6 isn't the only big news in February -- this week also marks the launch of a newly redesigned, Drupal-powered FastCompany.com! Fast Company Magazine has covered cutting edge business and tech industry news since the heady days of the early 90's, and the massive redesign of the magazine's site was a major undertaking for its publisher, Mansueto Digital.

The new site combines the magazine's print content with web-exclusive features, integrates the social features of Fast Company's long-running Company Of Friends business network, and gives members tools to filter through the web's river of news to find business topics they're interested in.

How was it built? Teams from Lullabot, Achieve Internet, Advomatic and Tree House Interactive worked together with Mansueto's internal development team to translate existing specs and wireframes into a working Drupal site. Views, CCK, BuddyList, and Organic Groups form the backbone of the site's structure, and a host of off-the-shelf contrib modules were used to add additional functionality. Examples include Views Fastsearch, used to build customized search screens for specific sections of the site, and the SimpleFeed module, which pulls in the content for each user's customizable news feed.

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

Today, Drupal powers sites including the homepages of Warner Brothers Records, The New York Observer, Fast Company, Popular Science, and Amnesty International and project sites by SonyBMG, Forbes, Harvard University, and more. Drupal can be used to create personal weblogs (Tim Berners-Lee), deliver podcasts (TWIT.tv), connect online communities (SpreadFireFox.com), or inform the masses (The Onion).

What will it take for Drupal to break through to be the most popular platform for websites? Drupal needs better marketing. Specifically Drupal needs more showcase sites and case studies to help evaluators understand what can be done with Drupal. We've already got a good list of case studies, success stories, featured sites, and a list of show case sites. To help rally the community, there will be a Drupal site showcase and case study contest at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon.

Go on over to the Drupalcon Boston site to submit your favorite sites and view and vote for the best ones.

Even though we are all currently very excited about DrupalCon Boston 2008 the Drupal Association is planning ahead to help coordinate the following DrupalCon for the Fall/Winter of 2008 in Europe. We mention Europe specifically since that has become a bit of a tradition, but if anyone would like to organize a conference in another location please draft and submit a proposal.

Request for Proposals

The Drupal Association is currently requesting proposals from aspiring DrupalCon organizers for the 2008 DrupalCon Europe. If you would like to organize a DrupalCon in your country please contact the association and submit a proposal that meets the criteria of the DrupalCon proposal guidelines

We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota Libraries are partnering with the Drupal development community on the first round of formal usability testing for the Drupal open source content management platform, to take place in February 2008.

• Testing will be conducted at the University's Office for Information Technology’s usability lab with the generous support of Usability Services.
• Seven Drupal community members, including project lead Dries Buytaert, will be on-site as members of the usability test team.
• Results will be presented at Drupalcon Boston, where we’ll discuss future directions indicated by the test results as well as next steps for further usability testing.
• To get involved or to learn more, see this post in the Usability Group.

Our goal is to provide the Drupal development community with a baseline picture of Drupal’s usability for common user tasks. In doing so, the University Libraries hope to improve user experience in a new generation of Drupal-based tools for discovering, managing, and sharing information.