News and announcements

Drupal 6 Content Administration, by J. Ayen Green, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal users, who are either not developers or are new to Drupal. This book is designed for those who run the site day-to-day but didn't set it up, and aren't necessarily that well versed in Drupal or web technologies, and as a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Foundation!

This is a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide that uses an actual case study. In an interactive and informal manner, this guide presents purposeful examples that continue to build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples mean you can learn quickly how to take care of the content in your Drupal site.

The Lullabot team is proud to announce its latest Drupal learning tool: Lullabot Online Workshops. The first of these is "Drupal Fundamentals", a six-week course beginning September 9th, 2009. Each week's live 2-hour streaming video-and-multimedia class will focus one one aspect in the process of building and configuring an entire Drupal site.

Students will be able to watch as the site is built and instructors delve deep into specific topics such as taxonomy, comments, building content types with CCK, and creating both simple and complex content listings with Views. Each weekly discussion will conclude with a question-and-answer period with the Lullabot instructors and a homework assignment to reinforce the lesson.

Each student will get his/her own sandbox Drupal site in which they can set up and experiment with Drupal. Each lesson will be recorded and placed in a student-accessible video archive, so whether one is unable to make it to a live session or simply needs to review, the class will be available to them in the archive. Additionally, students will be able to post to class message board where they can discuss lessons with the instructor and other students.

The short video "What is Drupal?" won six Telly Awards, it was announced earlier this month. The video, produced by pingVision, is a fast-paced promo-style introduction to Drupal. The total running time is about a minute.

The video had its "premiere" of sorts at South by SouthWest this year, playing in the Acquia booth in the Trade Show area.

Last week Development Seed launched Open Atrium, an "intranet in a box" that acts as a foundation for developing custom team collaboration and knowledge management tools. Drupal's strength as a framework and its strong developer community are clearly the reasons we love Drupal, but in this post I specifically want to focus on how installation profiles and the Features module have allowed us to create a tight out of the box experience for Open Atrium.