Packt has launched the third annual Open Source CMS Award today, giving fans of Drupal an opportunity to help them defend their title, which they won last year, collecting a first prize of $5,000.

The first stage of the Award is a call for nominations, which enables fans to nominate their favourite Open Source CMS. The five Content Management System's that receive the most nominations in each category will go through to the final stage of voting, which starts at the beginning of September, so your nomination counts!

To ensure that Drupal makes it through to the final voting stage, submit your nomination for Drupal here: www.PacktPub.com/article/nominate-overall-open-source-cms-winner/system/Drupal

Drupal is in the running as a finalist for the SourceForge 2008 Community awards in 5 categories. Voting ends on Friday.

1. Best project
2. Best project for Enterprise
3. Best project for Educators
4. Best Tool or Utility for Developers
5. Most Likely to Change the World

Update: Drupal 5.9 has been released to correct a vulnerability that was inadvertantly left in Drupal 5.8.

Drupal 6.3 and Drupal 5.8, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Drupal 6.3 also includes some changes to the installer to prevent file ownership issues on shared hosts; upgrades jQuery to version 1.2.6; improves PostreSQL compatibility; fixes performance issues in search, menu and form API and contains a variety of other small improvements. It should also be noted that the Views for Drupal 6 release candidate requires Drupal 6.3 to run properly.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

Aaron Winborn, of Advomatic and Embedded Media Field fame, has completed writing Drupal Multimedia, to be published by Packt Publishing this September (and you can pre-order now)! Packt will be donating a portion of the royalties to the Drupal Association, in keeping with their long-standing policy of supporting the Open Source community.

Written for Drupal 6, this book is a comprehensive overview of integrating multimedia into your Drupal-powered web site. With hands-on examples and tutorials, the book is written for site developers, themers, and administrators. The book makes no assumptions about your skill level, although one should probably already have an understanding of Drupal and how to set up and configure a basic site. The book will guide you through its topics, gently moving the reader from basic concepts such as module set-up, to intermediate techniques such as creating views, to advanced methods such as writing jQuery and custom modules.

Mid-terms for Google Summer of Code 2008 are upon us. We have 19 students and over 40 mentors working tirelessly to bring you fantastic code ranging from new design tools, to fantastic new APIs, to improvements to existing modules such as Views and NodeQueue. Read on to meet the students behind SoC, and actually test out preliminary alpha versions of their projects yourselves! Make sure to log feedback to the projects' issue queues. :)

For more information about Summer of Code, see the SoC 2008 group on groups.drupal.org.