News and announcements

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization is a new Drupal book authored by Ben Finklea and published by Packt Publishing. It’s a practical, step-by-step guide that takes the mystery out of Drupal search engine optimization (SEO) by showing you the tricks of today's top marketing pros to achieve top ranking in the search engines.

Packt Publishing is generously offering a 15% discount to any Drupal.org readers. To purchase Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization with this discount, visit www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-search-engine-optimization-seo/book and provide the code DrupalSEO15 (case sensitive) at check out. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

Packt Publishing, the company behind many well-known Drupal books, holds an annual Open Source CMS Award that recognizes open source content management platforms and their communities. In addition to bragging rights, winners also receive financial support for their projects in the form of cash prizes. Drupal has historically done very well in this competition, winning the overall award for the last two years running, as well as Best PHP Open Source Content Management System in last year's competition. This record of success is a tribute to the strength and passion of the Drupal community, as the awards are partially decided by popular vote.

In fact, Drupal has done so well in past years that the organizers of this year's award have retired it from eligibility for the overall award, instead pitting it against Joomla! in an all-new Hall of Fame category. In addition, they've created a Drupal Award to allow community members to vote fortheir favorite modules and themes. And if that wasn't enough, Drupal is also eligible for the Best Open Source PHP CMS award. All told, around $6,000 in prize money is at stake.

How can you help Drupal win again this year? Just go to Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award Web site before October 30 and cast your vote in the following categories:

• Hall of Fame
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Drupal Award

And to provide a little extra incentive, three voters who go to the site and fill out a brief survey will also win a free iPod Touch.

Show your support for Drupal and vote today!

Note: this has now been deployed on drupal.org. See the announcement post: Fully packaged Drupal distributions now deployed on drupal.org.

Since the 5.0 release, Drupal core has included an installer that supports installation profiles to setup and configure a site for a certain use-case. In theory this allows for people to create a better "out of the box" solution by configuring Drupal like a wiki, a conference, or a publishing site. If done right, installation profiles have the potential to help end-users get sites done faster and accelerate the adoption of Drupal. However, this promise has yet to be realized, and this core Drupal feature is currently being vastly underutilized.

As part of their grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Deproduction and Quiddities want to help realize the benefit that install profiles have to offer. The Drupal Association, with the support of individual and corporate sponsors, has put forth a matching grant to help see that it meets its mission of supporting the Drupal project. The potential to help address the usability problems of people trying to get started with Drupal is truly enormous.

Read on for details on how installation profiles work, why they are important, how packaging them will help, and the technical decisions behind the way the packaging scripts will work. Now is the chance to provide feedback which might make it into the code before it goes live by the end of November.