After Drupalcon (March 3-6 at the Boston Convention & Expo Center), the Drupal Association is hosting an all day code sprint at MIT on Friday March 7. All registered attendees are welcome. See below for details.

What’s a code sprint

A code sprint is a gathering of a bunch of programmers to complete a short, rapid development project. It allows developers from different countries and companies to work together and learn from each other. Most importantly, it’s a fun event where we can make some impressive advances for Drupal.

We’re all meeting in a big room, where we’ll code and talk smack until we get kicked out. Come chat with long-time Drupalers to learn from their experience.

On Tuesday our friends and colleagues at Joomla! announced the release of Joomla! 1.5.

In their release note, the Joomla! developers remark that

The next phase offers the opportunity to bring together the code created, lessons learned, and momentum gained, to build something truly great. It took us tens of thousands of hours, thousands of revisions, and hundreds of people to get to this point. It has been a remarkable journey filled with fun, discovery, and enlightenment where everyone has something to offer and anyone can contribute.

I don't think we could have said it better ourselves! And, with the release of Drupal 6 right around the corner, I'm sure we all know exactly how proud they are of a job well done.

As our Joomla! friends have said before, we're friends with common goals, and we are all on the same side. We both value PHP, MySQL, GPL licenses, community based collaboration, open standards, accessibility, low-resource requirements, ease of use, and an extensible and modular design. And, ultimately, we all agree that open source matters.

Last year was one of the most exciting years for Drupal. We saw Drupal 5 mature into the powerful engine that it now is, and have spent the last few months anxiously awaiting the release of Drupal 6. The user base of Drupal.org has grown exponentially, to about 250,000 registered members presently, with about a thousand new users registering every day. The Drupal Association is positioning itself as a leader for the Drupal community, and has recently held its first General Assembly.

MySQL AB and KernelTrap.org's Jeremy Andrews are partnering up to offer an online presentation titled "Achieving Optimal MySQL Performance For Drupal". Aiming to provide a better understanding of how to properly monitor and tune your MySQL database, the online Webinar will take place on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, at 16:00 UTC (11:00 am EST). The presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for questions and answers. You can http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-94.html">sign up for the free event here.

The presentation will offer insights into understanding your database's current performance. It will start by detailing some recommended methods for monitoring MySQL, measuring performance and isolating bottlenecks. Next, MySQL storage engines will be briefly discussed, offering tips on choosing between MyISAM and InnoDB. Finally, the talk will offer concrete details on how to actually optimize MySQL for improving Drupal performance.

The Boston Drupal conference will have tracks, planned sessions, as well as sessions from the community. We had 31 Drupal sessions at OSCMS, and 93 sessions at Barcelona. While both of these conferences were highly successful, this year the conference organizers are aiming to raise the bar even higher in terms of session quality.

• Business and marketing track
• Design and user experience track
• Site building track
• Community and core

Drupalcon Boston 2008 registration is now open. Please register for the conference site, and then pay your $195 conference fee. You can also purchase a conference sponsorship for your organization, and learn about the benefits that best meet your organizations needs.