News and announcements

Given the success of David Mercer's first Drupal title for beginners, Packt has published a new and improved edition to go with the latest release of Drupal. The new book, still targetted at beginners and intermediates, builds on its predecessor to provide a steeper launching ramp for everyone who still feels they're not yet a pro.

Changes to the new version include:

• Slimmed down writing, to provide faster flowing and more concentrated information
• Updates to all the original text to reflect the enhanced features of D6
• Vastly expanded the range of topics
• Increased the depth and level of coverage for many topics

Despite the fact that I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained, the new version is over 330 pages. This gives you an idea of how much new material went into this edition in order to bring it up to speed with this most impressive of Drupal releases. This new book is as much an overhaul of the last as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

I hope that this title will meet the following goals that I have personally set for it:

1. To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club

Something for Drupal beginners. I've posted a short (< 10 minutes) screencast on YouTube that walks through the process of installing a module. Nothing groundbreaking here but I think that every little bit helps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9rJHtR2GEs

Rob Safuto
http://www.awakenedvoice.com

Drupal Code Search lets you search source code from thousands of Drupal modules and themes, use regular expressions, filter results by version, and more.

The goal of this project is to help themers and module developers find code examples faster and easier than before. Results are retrieved using the Code Search Data API.

This project is still experimental, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated. :)

I hope you find it useful!

groups.drupal.org now features Pages, a major new feature added this week. Group admins now have much more control over the presentation of their group’s content. You may see this feature in action by clicking on the tabs in the redesigned Drupal Dojo group. To learn how this customization was achieved, watch this screencast (blip.tv) by Josh Koenig.

Group admins may add as many custom Pages as they desire to their group. The admin may choose her own page layout, and may place whatever content she wishes into each region of the page. If this sounds like Panels module to you, then pat yourself on the back. This feature is a happy integration between Organic Groups module and the Panels module.

Group admins are encouraged to build out their groups using Pages (see screencast), and report bugs or feature requests in the groups.drupal.org group.

Many thanks to Earl Miles for Panels and Views, and to Josh Koenig for the screencast, and to the Post Carbon Institute for funding og_panels module.

The MotoGP World Championship, the oldest motorsport world championship (started back in 1949), is about to launch the brand new version of its website. After several months of development and testing the public beta is now online for all the fans of the sport.