News and announcements

Update: Drupal 6.0 Release Candidate 2 is available now!

Following four beta releases, and with tons of bugs fixed and user interface improvements added, we are proud to present to you the first release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing for you, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the last beta version was released two weeks ago, we have improved on the embedded developer documentation, strengthened several update functions to ensure that updates are properly applied for Drupal core and contributed modules, revised most user help text and form descriptions to be more understandable and accurate, made user logins more secure, improved right to left language support for several features, and improved table indexes to help with referential integrity and improve performance.

The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

There are a number of modules already ported to Drupal 6. A list of already released updates is available on the modules page by selecting 6.x from the drop-down menu. For all other modules that don't yet have 6.x compatible releases, keep your eye on the modules' issue queues or on the Drupal 6.x contributed module status page to get an idea on the upgrade time-frame. If you are a module maintainer, now is the time to start working on the update to Drupal 6! Read on for more details.

Acquia, Inc. today announced it has secured $7 million in a Series A financing led by North Bridge Venture Partners, with additional investment from Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company plans to use the capital to create value-added software and network services around the popular Drupal open source web collaboration and publishing platform. Company founders are Dries Buytaert, original creator of Drupal, and Jay Batson, previously founding CEO of open source VOIP software company Pingtel.

Packt Publishing has announced the first book on Drupal 6, titled Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, which is an update to their bestselling "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites", written by David Mercer. This is a description from the publisher:

This book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from knowing you want a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner. Aimed in particular at beginners to Drupal, this book will allow readers to advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any problem with confidence.

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

Highlights

As of right now, since the contest's inception on November 28, 2007:

• We've had participation from 42 students, of which 27 (64%) have completed one or more tasks.
• We've had a total of 36 tasks completed so far, in areas such as code, documentation, quality assurance, user interface, outreach, training, research, and translation.
• Of the students who have completed tasks, 60% are *new* contributors who came to Drupal because of this program. Of those, two have already completed 4 tasks and are on their 5th!
• We have over 100 task slots available; we currently have used up 73 out of 200.
• We are desperately short on task contributions from the community. There are currently only 8 remaining tasks for students to choose from!! Unless we can turn this situation around within about 24 hours, students are going to end up going with projects like Joomla! and Python once they finish what they're working on. Yay!! Thanks SO much for your help! Please keep those great task proposals coming! Now what we really need are people to review and improve the existing task ideas so we can get them added to the queue!

Read on for more info on how these students are completely rockin' and how you can help them continue to do so.