News and announcements

DrupalEd is now available for download! The full announcement is available here --

In distributing this version, we opted to distribute the site as a tarball with all relevant code and third-party libraries. Down the road, we'd like to figure out a way around this, but given that both TinyMCE and the audio module require LGPL'd libraries that can't be hosted on d.o, AND that many people in education are working through software issues without a great deal of tech support, we figured a tarball with all the necessary code would lower the barrier to entry sigificantly. However, we would like to move away from this in the medium-to-long term -- we'd love to hear some ideas on ways around this .

This version bundles some useful functionality, and it is by no means done -- the biggest short-term priority is to build out an install profile, but we'll be writing up some more comprehensive notes over the next week.

After over a year of research and writing, Pro Drupal Development is now shipping. Written by core developers John VanDyk and Matt Westgate, the book is intended to help new developers climb up the Drupal learning curve quickly.

The book covers Drupal 5, from creating a basic module to in-depth documentation of the menu system and form API. Many heavy hitters in the Drupal community contributed to the book by reviewing drafts and offering suggestions and improvements. Among them were Károly Négyesi, Steven Wittens, Angela Byron, Heine Deelstra, John Resig, Ted Serbinski, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, Gábor Hojtsy, and Neil Drumm. In addition to reviewing chapters, Dries wrote the foreword.

Please note that if you decide to purchase the book, please do so from the "Buy" tab on http://www.drupalbook.com/ ... the Drupal Association will receive a small portion of the sale.

Here is the table of contents:

The Drupal Association has received a $5,800 donation from Drupal consulting company Lullabot. This donation comes from the profits of the Performance and Scalability seminar that was held as a fundraiser on March 24, 2007, following the Open Source CMS Summit at Yahoo! campus.

The seminar was co-presented by a panel consisting of Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, James Walker of Bryght, Jeremy Andrews of CivicSpace, and Matt Westgate and Robert Douglass of Lullabot. The panel spent the day evaluating the role each part of the software stack plays in performance and scalability, and imparting each person's experience to the attendees. The presentation slides from this event are available from http://www.lullabot.com/articles/performance_and_scalability_seminar_slides.

In addition to providing this donation to the Drupal Association, the funds raised by the seminar also paid for a Drupal "hackfest" the following day. In this face-to-face environment, Drupal developers were able to lay substantial groundwork for many important improvements to Drupal, including further revamps to the core menu system, and extending content type building functionality (CCK).