News and announcements

Drupal has been criticized a lot for being "hard to install". As far back as the beginning of 2004, Adrian Rossouw began to work on the installer system (see Install system - requirements and Drupal install system) and after a lot of work by the fine CivicSpaceLabs folks (Kieran Lal, Jeremy Andrews, Nedjo Rogers, Angie Byron and others), Karoly Negyesi took over the patch this June. A month of further development (with quite some help from Jeff Eaton and, again, lots others), saw Steven Wittens taking the torch on July 12 and finally, on July 13, the biggest and most often requested improvement to Drupal core got committed!

The popular IBM developerWorks site has started a new series entitled "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site". After reviewing numerous open source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, and the ever-hyped Ruby on Rails, they "decided to use Drupal", remarking that it "provided the right combination of framework and flexibility . . . to get the job done". They also echo many of our user's concerns about potential complexity: "There is still an apparent learning curve to the "Drupal Way" of creating sites, but significantly less compared with other CMSs.

Packt, the publishing company behind the new Drupal book have released a website designed to give you more information about the book.

http://drupalbook.packtpub.com/ allows you to view content from the book and also read through summaries of each chapter. Chapter 2 "Setting up the Development Environment" has been made available in its entirety for free download.