News and announcements

Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link.

UPDATE: Huge congratulations to our GHOP equally-as-awesome winners! Read about it on the Google Open Source Blog!

Also see the official GHOP grand prize winners announcement.

The GHOP contest officially ended on February 4, 2008. This contest was an absolutely amazing success, and resulted in a number of new contributors to the Drupal project. If you're interested in learning more about the contest, there was a recent Lullabot podcast about GHOP, and there will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months, and would like to talk to a few of the students face-to-face.

• Peter Cawley (Corsix) was selected as Drupal's GHOP grand prize winner, and will receive a paid travel to Google campus in Mountain View, California in early May, along with the GHOP winners from other projects. Peter completed a whopping 15 tasks, his greatest accomplishment being the creation of the awesome new Flexifilter module, which allows site builders to create custom input filters without having to write code and/or install a new module for each new filter. This module was envisioned by fellow GHOP student cwgordon7, and mentored by a Drupal contributor too young to take part in GHOP, dmitrig01. Way to go, Corsix!!! :D
• Peter will be accompanied on his trip to Google by Adam Light (aclight), who did a tremendous job handling the administration of the GHOP contest, as well as helping students and mentors alike with GHOP tasks.
• We'd also like to extend our congratulations to everyone who participated, including our equally-as-awesome winners, Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7), Edward Z. Yang (ezyang), Jimmy Berry (boombatower), Wilson Lee (kourge), and Dmitri G. (dmitrig01) (who was too young to participate in GHOP, but helped a lot with mentoring and administration, and so was named honorary winner :)).
• A total of 130 tasks were completed, ranging from new and upgraded modules, enhancements to existing modules, much-needed documentation, helpful videocasts, beautiful marketing materials, and more. Almost half of those were completed during the last month of the program.
• We had a total of 54 awesome student participants during the course of GHOP, of which 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest. Amazing!
• The leaders in terms of raw task numbers were Corsix (15), boombatower (12), ezyang (10), cwgordon7 (9), and kourge (9), but we also benefited from several students who took on only a few tasks and knocked them out of the park. Most of our GHOP students are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community. :)
• Thanks to everyone for all of the great community support we've received during this contest! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

What comes next, now that GHOP is over? DROP! Read on to find out more, and also to see a list of the tasks completed since our last status report.

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

Today, Drupal powers sites including the homepages of Warner Brothers Records, The New York Observer, Fast Company, Popular Science, and Amnesty International and project sites by SonyBMG, Forbes, Harvard University, and more. Drupal can be used to create personal weblogs (Tim Berners-Lee), deliver podcasts (TWIT.tv), connect online communities (SpreadFireFox.com), or inform the masses (The Onion).