News and announcements

Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal outside of education as well.

One mom's mission to create a safe online space for teens

Yoursphere.com is a safe kids-only social network (built with Drupal 5), which is complemented by an online safety blog and discussion site, internet-safety.yoursphere.com (built with Acquia Drupal).

Founder Mary Kay Hoal is a savvy mother of five. When her children started spending time on social network sites such as MySpace she did a little research and was shocked to find that social networks were magnets for sexual predators and rampant with inappropriate content targeting youth. "We wouldn't open our front door and invite 29,000 registered sex offenders into the house," Mary Kay told her kids, "so why should we accept that online?"

So she banned social networking from her home and saw her approval rating dip below that of steamed broccoli. Besides being unpopular at home, Mary Kay also knew that trying to banish MySpace would be a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. She really had no choice -- it was her duty as a mom to create a safe alternative.

While many people say that theming is one of the better organized topics in Drupal's documentation, many have expressed frustration that relevant pages are located in a variety of different branches, and even separate handbooks. The documentation team has also decided that this has created an unsustainable path for forward maintenance. Therefore, as a first step, we are going to merge nearly all theming-related information into a single Consolidated Theming Guide on Sunday, 23 November, to be located at http://drupal.org/theme-guide (currently pointing to the Drupal 6 Theme Guide). Existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible.

A theming documentation workgroup is now forming to focus on reorganizing the new book's navigation hierarchy. For further information on the project and how to join in, please visit the group's project page.

Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.