News and announcements

Drupal Global Training Days is this Friday, June 22! This is a day where training companies around the world will introduce new and beginning users to Drupal through half day, full day and virtual sessions. More than sixteen training companies representing Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, South America (and two online!) are signed up to participate on June 22. The Drupal Association launched this program of free or low cost training events to provide an easy way for new users to be introduced to Drupal and our wonderful Drupal community.

The June 22 Drupal Global Training Days will be offered with one of two curriculums:

• "Introduction to Drupal," a full day training on the basics of Drupal. Attendees will leave having successfully built a Drupal site. It is ideal for those interested in exploring Drupal as a career path.
• “What is Drupal?” This half-day workshop will address the basics of Drupal, and will give an overview to those interested in evaluating or implementing Drupal.

For a listing of all training locations across the globe: http://drupal.org/learn-drupal. Upcoming dates include September 14 and December 14, 2012.

This post aims to share information about the Drupal Security Team in 2011 and midway through 2012. The team processed a significant number of security advisories, added a few members, improved the free education materials in the handbooks, presented at dozens of camps and user groups, and made several improvements to our workflow (including some user facing changes, see below).

Some quick numbers:

• 3 team meetings at Drupalcon Chicago, Drupalcon London and Drupal Denver
• 3 core security releases in 2011 compared to 2 in 2010
• 59 contributed project security releases in 2011 compared to 113 in 2010
• 137 issues created on our private issue tracker in 2011 - security.drupal.org
• 1645 comments created on those issues on security.drupal.org in 2011 (including automated comments)
• dozens of issues were reported to the team and became public issues because they are not supported in our private process

I selected Angela "webchick" Byron as my co-maintainer for Drupal 7 back in DrupalCon Szeged in August 2008. Since then, together we shepherded efforts of 1,000 core contributors to create Drupal 7, got the release out the door in January of last year, and worked hard thereafter to stabilize Drupal 7, to the point that the number of Drupal 7 sites eclipsed the number of Drupal 6 sites earlier this year.

However, Angela's level of responsibility in the community has grown significantly in the past 3.5 years, and she wears many hats, from Drupal Association board member to code sprint planner to Drupal.org coordinator to evangelist to general community cat herder. We both felt that it was time to transition the role of Drupal 7 core co-maintainer off of her plate, in order to give her more time to focus on her other community roles.