As you might know, we try to organize at least two big Drupal events a year: one in North America and one in Europe. The latest Drupal conference took place in Vancouver and attracted more than 150 people! That is almost 6 months ago so a couple months ago we started scouting venues for this year's European Drupal conference. We are pleased to announce that this year's DrupalCON Europe which will take place in Brussels (Belgium), the second half of September (two months from now!). We'll communicate the exact dates and location as soon we have confirmation from the venue -- hopefully by the end of next week.

As it stands, we'll have several rooms with projectors so I'm thinking we should allocate one or two rooms for scheduled presentations, and use two or more rooms for self-organizing activities like bug hunts, code sprints, brainstorm sessions, meetings and ad-hoc presentations. That said, we're open for all kinds of suggestions. The purpose of this topic is to ask you some questions and to get early feedback to help us organize the schedule.

This conference is organized by the Drupal community for the Drupal community so we'd appreciate your suggestions! Here are some questions to get you started:

1. What talks or demos would you be interested in?
2. What do you hope to get out of DrupalCON Europe?
3. Would you be willing to present, and if so, about what?
4. What was your personal highlight at past Drupal conferences?

When: 19:00 for 19:30 Wed 9 Aug 2006
Location: Boxing Club, Old Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Rd, Limeouse, E14 7HA
(Directions and map at http://www.bclub.org.uk/about)

London's Development workshops will take place on the 2nd Wed of every month. We will be looking under the hood and poking around what makes Drupal work.

From the Packt Publishing web site (http://www.packtpub.com/award/):

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com.

The new TWiT.tv has finally launched. Graphics by Arktyp and built by Lullabot, the new site is certainly a showcase that Drupal *can* be used to make beautiful sites. The site only uses a handful of modules, with a majority of it being just theming, CCK (for podcasts), and Views (for the episode guide).

Drupal has been criticized a lot for being "hard to install". As far back as the beginning of 2004, Adrian Rossouw began to work on the installer system (see Install system - requirements and Drupal install system) and after a lot of work by the fine CivicSpaceLabs folks (Kieran Lal, Jeremy Andrews, Nedjo Rogers, Angie Byron and others), Karoly Negyesi took over the patch this June. A month of further development (with quite some help from Jeff Eaton and, again, lots others), saw Steven Wittens taking the torch on July 12 and finally, on July 13, the biggest and most often requested improvement to Drupal core got committed!

The popular IBM developerWorks site has started a new series entitled "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site". After reviewing numerous open source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, and the ever-hyped Ruby on Rails, they "decided to use Drupal", remarking that it "provided the right combination of framework and flexibility . . . to get the job done". They also echo many of our user's concerns about potential complexity: "There is still an apparent learning curve to the "Drupal Way" of creating sites, but significantly less compared with other CMSs.