PHPArchitect is a printed magazine devoted to spreading information about PHP and related projects like MySQL, PHPMyAdmin and... Drupal! Look at the cover of the current issue and you will see 70% of the frontpage is taken by our beloved Druplicon.

Organizations, these days, are demanding content management applications, from company homepages to large, community websites. Author Titus Barik shows you how you can let Drupal help you build these sites quickly and efficiently by building on a common, modular framework.

On this page, Druplicon is introduced to the public as:

If you've already seen the cover (and if not, take a look!), you may be wondering what that raindrop-type-character is all about. It's called the "Druplicon," and it's the mascot and logo for a PHP content management system that is gaining more and more momentum: Drupal. Titus Barik takes you through the basics of how to use Drupal to create a real website, in short order, and without rewriting that same form-processing code.

Today I received a very nice package in the mail; my Drupal book is finally available!

When I first met Dries Buytaert, in February in Antwerp, we discussed the need for a book explaining how to use Drupal. We agreed that such a book would be a great asset to the many people who are becoming interested in our great software. Since I had already decided that it was my goal to write a Drupal book, I expressed this to Dries.

Soon after the conference, Dries was approached by Matt Wade, an editor at Apress, about writing 1/3 of a book about building online communities. The other 2/3 would discuss phpBB and WordPress, two other immensely popular projects that address different niches. As Dries was too busy with his studies to write a book, he introduced me to Matt.

The result was a project that lasted until October; writing the first book about Drupal. I knew that I would need lots of support, and therefore asked James Walker to be the technical editor. This turned out to be a very good move, as James is a "Drupal Rockstar" who always knows the smallest technical details, and has worked with many many clients and other people to know which parts of Drupal are hard to grasp, and where the hidden sticking points are. He helped me decide how to present the many concepts and capabilities that are not always intuitive.

It is that time of the year again! After predictions for 2004 and 2005, we continue this tradition about what Drupal will do in 2006.

Looking back to the predictions for 2005, it seems that some predictions were far from right, if serious at all. Some posters, however, turned out to be true fortune tellers...

Big news folks- CivicSpace Labs has just helped a major new eCommerce company launch this week using on CivicSpace/Drupal, at http://www.GoodStorm.com. We think this is going to be one of the highest traffic CivicSpace sites ever launched, and it's already yielding a lot of new useful Drupal code(organic group stores, e-commerce products, sub-products, apparel, paypal pro, e-civicrm).

GoodStorm is explicitly aimed at helping non-profit organization earn income to support their work through merchandising-- which is to say that it provides production, online sales, and fulfillment of printed branded apparel as an online service. We think that where CivicSpace helps to provide online tools to organizations, GoodStorm will help the organizations help themselves to become financially sustainable.

Drupal 4.7.0 beta 2 is now available for download at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-beta2.tar.gz. This is the second beta release of the forthcoming Drupal 4.7.0 release.

Over 50 bugs have been fixed since beta 1, but we know there are still more to find, report, and fix. Being a community, this is a community effort and we need as much of the community as we can get to come forward and help us out so that we can get this system to a stable 4.7.0 release. Read on for more information about how you can help.

On Saturday, December 17 at 18:00GMT (noon eastern time US, 7pm central european time), I will be welcoming the whole Drupal community to a Bug Fixing party. Even if you can't attend at that time, you can still help out. See below.

We are determined to make 4.7 our most powerful, and least buggy release to date. Almost everyone can contribute in one way or another. Our party is coordinated via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Meet fellow Drupalites in the room entitled #drupal-bugfix on the server chat.freenode.net. If you are unfamilar with IRC, you will need to download an IRC client application to your PC.