News and announcements

Even though we are all currently very excited about DrupalCon Boston 2008 the Drupal Association is planning ahead to help coordinate the following DrupalCon for the Fall/Winter of 2008 in Europe. We mention Europe specifically since that has become a bit of a tradition, but if anyone would like to organize a conference in another location please draft and submit a proposal.

Request for Proposals

The Drupal Association is currently requesting proposals from aspiring DrupalCon organizers for the 2008 DrupalCon Europe. If you would like to organize a DrupalCon in your country please contact the association and submit a proposal that meets the criteria of the DrupalCon proposal guidelines

We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota Libraries are partnering with the Drupal development community on the first round of formal usability testing for the Drupal open source content management platform, to take place in February 2008.

• Testing will be conducted at the University's Office for Information Technology’s usability lab with the generous support of Usability Services.
• Seven Drupal community members, including project lead Dries Buytaert, will be on-site as members of the usability test team.
• Results will be presented at Drupalcon Boston, where we’ll discuss future directions indicated by the test results as well as next steps for further usability testing.
• To get involved or to learn more, see this post in the Usability Group.

Our goal is to provide the Drupal development community with a baseline picture of Drupal’s usability for common user tasks. In doing so, the University Libraries hope to improve user experience in a new generation of Drupal-based tools for discovering, managing, and sharing information.

Drupal 6 has been in a code freeze for more than 6 months and is almost ready to be released now. We're only a few bug fixes away from the first final Drupal 6.0 release. Therefore, I just created the DRUPAL-6 CVS branch for Drupal core. This means that while Drupal 6 is being finalized and we prepare for the Drupal 6.0 release, we'll also start accepting new features and improvements for Drupal 7, the next major version of Drupal.

For maximum effectiveness, feature requests for Drupal 7, should go in the the list of feature requests. In my State of Drupal presentation in Barcelona I hinted about what would be the killer Drupal 7 release according to a survey I conducted. While that list is not exclusive and nothing but a wishlist (not a deliverable), it might be worth a look if you want to help shape the future of Drupal.