Drupal
Open editing is here to stay
Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!
In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.
This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.
Announcing O'Reilly Drupal book: Using Drupal
Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.
Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.
CCK 2.0 for Drupal 6 officially released
CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to provide stronger code and APIs. We've tried to respond to many of the things that were often requested but were difficult or impossible to do in the Drupal 5 version: streamline the process of creating fields, use drag-n-drop to reorganize fields and values, provide a user-friendly 'Add more' button for multiple values, give developers an API and more tools to customize CCK behavior, and provide more documentation.
Many of the things you see in the latest code would not have been possible without all the new Drupal 6 and Views 2 features. Drupal 6, CCK 2 and Views 2 make a great combination!
CCK Links- Project page
- CCK 6.x-2.0 release notes (people upgrading from previous RCs should read this).
- Download CCK 6.x-2.0 - Fresh from the maintainers: 6.x-2.1 bugfix release
Important: This release fixes a (minor) security issue that was present in the previous RC releases.
See the Security Annoucement for more informations.
Drupal.org scheduled maintenance, Sat, Nov. 8th, 02:00 GMT
Drupal.org will undergo a scheduled maintenance period Saturday, Nov. 8th, 02:00 GMT. Barring problems, the maintenance should take about 15-30 minutes.
NOTE: Maintenance is complete, and took about 25 minutes. Everything was accomplished without issue.
New Drupal Book Published: Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn
A year after answering Dries Buytaert's call for Drupal book authors, Aaron Winborn is pleased to announce the publication of Drupal Multimedia, which is now available! Packt Publishing, known for their support of Open Source projects, will donate a portion of the book's royalties to the Drupal Association.
The book teaches the best practices and contributed modules for integrating Images, Video, and Audio into your site. Written for Drupal 6, the book assumes you are a developer, themer, or administrator who needs to embed multimedia. It makes heavy use of Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2, and offers demonstrations of the various modules required for the task.
The book helps to answer common questions, such as when to use Image or ImageField, how to leverage the power of FileField, and how to override theme functions to display multimedia content the way we need it.
Drupal Wins Best Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award for Second Year in a Row
The Drupal Association today announced that Drupal has won two prestigious Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards this week - the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS. This marks the second consecutive year that Drupal has won Packt Publishing’s Overall Open Source CMS award. In addition, on Monday, Packt Publishing recognized leading Drupal contributor Earl Miles as a 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued Person (MVP).
Drupal wins 2008 Best PHP Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing
For the third year in a row, Drupal has been nominated for a Packt Publishing Open Source CMS award. Packt Publishing is announcing winners all week. Today they announced the 2008 best PHP open source CMS.
The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.
Drupal won this award in both the popular vote and the judges selection. The judges cited improvements to installation, updates, breadth of features in modules, and how Drupal handles errors in these processes. Of special note was Drupal's use of social features and how those features integrate with web content management. Of course the final advantage Drupal had was the "large and hugely supportive community". This award belongs to everyone in the Drupal community for helping each other and particularly new users.
Earl Miles named one of 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People by Packt Publishing
This morning Earl Miles, also known as merlinofchaos, was named one of the 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People. Earl won specifically for his contributions to the Drupal project.
What is particularly exciting about this award is that Earl is the third Drupal community member to win an award for their contributions to the Drupal project this year. Bryan Ruby said it best.
What I found interesting is that most of the MVPs for projects were the projects' lead/founder. Perhaps that says something about Drupal truly being community driven.
Please congratulate Earl on a well deserved award for his contributions and leadership to the Drupal project. You can read Earl's response on his blog Angry Donuts.