News and announcements

Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x, by George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, is a new title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at business owners and ordinary Drupal users without development expertise who want to create, administer and design their own online shop. This is the first title that deals with Ubercart 2.x, providing non-technical users with information about how to sell shippable goods, downloadable products, recurring memberships, and event tickets, as well as enable other complex interactions using various contributed Drupal modules. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% or 20% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

2010 is here and its time for another Summer of Code, courtesy of Google! For those who don't know, Summer of Code is an amazing program in which student developers are paid a stipend by Google in exchange for working on open source projects along with mentors from those projects. Drupal has benefited enormously from Summer of Code over the years. Many of our most productive and well-known members are former Summer of Code students, including Drupal 7 core maintainer Angela Byron (webchick), Drupal 6 core maintainer Gábor Hojtsy and many many more. For more information see the Summer of Code FAQ.

2010 marks Drupal's sixth year being accepted as a mentoring organization. Last year we successfully completed 21 student projects and it would be great to match or even surpass that this year, but there are two things we need to make that happen - Students and Mentors!

On Saturday, April 17th, the weekend before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers. Meeting in person for a full day and having more focused time to brainstorm about just core, should be really valuable. We can come up with plans to get Drupal 7 released, and we can get initial alignment on Drupal 8.

To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In addition to the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions and breakout sessions in smaller groups. The lightning talks will take the format: "How to make X more awesome?" where X can be anything in Drupal core. The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration. The original plan was to have 16 lightning talks, but based on feedback, I'm now leaning towards more breakout sessions and fewer lightning talks. On Sunday, the day after the Drupal core developer summit, there will be a code lounge where longer breakout sessions can be held too. Suggestions welcome as we can still made adjustments. Read on to learn more about how to attend.