Just a few years ago Drupal.org was maintained by a small team of insiders. Now, we are making major changes to the site using the community's many developers and themers.

This update provides the Drupal community our implementation redesign progress, where we've run into challenges, and provide information about our future plans.

The following update provides insight into:

1. Our progress so far
2. The present focus of the implementation and management team
3. Where help is needed from the community

The Drupal.org redesign is an effort started in 2007 to make Drupal.org meet the needs of the growing Drupal community and showcase the power of the Drupal software. In 2008, an exciting and visionary new design for Drupal.org was completed by Mark Boulton Design and the community.

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After a highly successful Drupal deployment for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) national website, the ASMP decided to again use Drupal for their next project: Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow, or dpBestflow for short. DP Bestflow is a Library of Congress-funded initiative to provide an all-encompassing resource for digital photography best practices.

The ASMP once again teamed up with Chicago's Grillo Group for graphic design, and Philadelphia-based web development firm Context to perform the Drupal implementation. The most impressive part of the site, however, is the immense amount of rich, useful content, the majority of which is the handiwork of digital photography gurus Richard Anderson (author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow) and Peter Krogh (author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers).

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After a lot of work, waiting, staging, and such I am proud to announce the addition of contributed projects to the automated testing system. Contributed projects may now take advantage of the same system that Drupal core developers have been using for over a year with great success. The deployment comes quickly after the recent 2.0 launch in late November of 2009. In addition to adding support for contributed project testing a number of other features have been added, most notably:

• Coder and Coder Tough Love review support.
• General e-mail notifications - the devlist mailing list will get an e-mail when Drupal core breaks.
• A number of UI/workflow improvments on drupal.org.
• Grouping of reviews by type or plugin to make room for a cleaner multiple database testing workflow.
• Additional administrative tools for qa.drupal.org and testing clients.
• Views RSS feed plugin for aggregation of test events and results.

For an example of the test results, please take a look at the current Drupal 7 (HEAD) results or one of our beta contributed project results, such as poormanscron.

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The San Francisco DrupalCon organizing committee is happy to announce that session submissions are open!

Come see the sessions that have already been proposed, and if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, suggest your own. Drupal's community is what sets it apart from the pack, so come be a part of the magic!

The session submission and voting schedule is:

• January 15, 2010 to February 15, 2010 - Session Submissions Open
• February 16, 2010 - March 1, 2010 - Public Voting on Sessions
• 
March 5, 2010 - Speakers Notified

• March 15, 2010 - Final Schedule Posted

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On Saturday 2010-01-23 from 2:00AM to 3:00AM UTC (6PM-7PM PST), drupal.org will be down for scheduled maintenance. We will be deploying an update to our unit testing framework. We appreciate your patience during this outage, the site will be back up as soon as possible.

SharkScopers is a Drupal 6 site that allows online poker instructors to sell screencast tutorial videos. The first two minutes can be viewed by anyone. Users can purchase credits that unlock whole videos. Instructors then receive a cut of the profit.

Jonathan Brown from Blue Droplet Media in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been helping Mike Jonas from SharkScope in New York develop the site for more than a year. It uses Jonathan's Blue Droplet Video module extensively.

Mike had done a lot of research into what system should be used to build the site. His primary motivation for choosing Drupal was so that Blue Droplet Video could be used. He was blown away by how BDV integrates with CCK and Views, allowing the fundamentals of the site to be created with great ease.

Jonathan and Mike have very well defined roles within the project. For each task, they consult via email and Skype to construct robust specifications. Jonathan then implements the required functionality. A release early, release often methodology is used, allowing the site to innovate rapidly.

The fantastic theme was created entirely by Mike as a Zen sub-theme.

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Healing Thresholds Autism Therapy provides comprehensive therapy fact sheets, daily updates of research and news, and a global directory of autism therapists. The site has become a standard and definitive source for autism treatment information. In particular, the site provides layperson-accessible summaries of essentially all child-focused research from the last 3 years, in addition to earlier seminal papers.

The two biggest challenges of the site have been to expose all of the deep content we've authored and to monetize it. We have over 2000 carefully-written research and news summaries and user-generated content. We also have over 1000 taxonomy terms, and we've authored detailed definitions for nearly half.

Our redesign last month upgraded the three-year-old Drupal 4.7-based site to Drupal 6. More importantly, we used the flexibility of Drupal to completely re-architect how users find and interact with our content. Where previously we had separate sections of research and news, our new tabbed interface displays -- in a search engine friendly fashion -- all of the relevant content for each of over 1000 different therapy topics.

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After nearly two years of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first alpha version of the Drupal 7.x family. This alpha includes a tremendous number of new features and new under-the-hood improvements for both users and developers.

We revamped Drupal's user interface, added key contributed modules including CCK and ImageField, introduced a new object-oriented database layer, revamped file handling capabilities, and an automated testing framework based on SimpleTest, among literally hundreds of other improvements. Drupal 7.0 alpha 1 is the collective work of over 800 core contributors.

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

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The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is an open source project developing a free virtual appliance library that pre-integrates the very best server-oriented open source software. TurnKey Linux appliances are simple, ready-to-use servers that are designed to "just work" and can be deployed in minutes on a virtual machine, bare metal or in the cloud.

The purpose of this case study is to discuss our experience using Drupal to implement TurnKey's web site.

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On Tuesday 2010-01-12 from 5:00PM to 6:00PM Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8), drupal.org will be down for scheduled maintenance. We will be rebooting our main file server for security updates and preparing to transition to a highly-available file server. This reboot should not take the entire window, but is more likely to take around 30 minutes. We appreciate your patience.

Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours helps you get up to speed with Drupal quickly. Whether you're starting from scratch or working to fill in some gaps in your Drupal knowledge, you'll find descriptions, examples, and Try It Yourself numbered steps to walk you through working with Drupal.

This book introduces you to Drupal and to major components ranging from the basics (overall design, themes, administration, security, and the like) as well as modules that are distributed with Drupal itself along with contributed modules that enhance your site. Each chapter is focused on a single task so that you can jump around according to your needs.

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New training to help you learn how to build Drupal themes is available online from Lynda.com. Drupal: Creating and Editing Custom Themes shows how a Drupal theme can alter the look and feel of a web site. Drupal evangelist and author Chris Charlton introduces the core themes that ship with Drupal, how to install and administer new themes, change color schemes, and add sub-themes. Also demonstrated is how to build a custom theme from scratch, what templates are possible in Drupal themes; integrate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and how to theme specific nodes, pages, and blocks by building a theme step-by-step for a fictitious online flower shop.

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On Thursday 2010-01-07 from 6:00PM to 7:00PM Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8), drupal.org will be down for scheduled maintenance. We will be deploying updates to our automated unit testing architecture and expect everything to go smoothly. It is unlikely we will actually be down for the extent of our window, more likely we will be down for 15 minutes. However, that window is reserved for this maintenance. Thanks for your understanding.

NOTE: This outage was originally scheduled for the day before. We apologize for the inconvenience, but need to be sure all code is ready for deployment.

My new book, Drupal for Dummies, is now available. My intended audience is non-technical, so if you've got a friend who wants you to build a Drupal site for them, this might be worth mentioning to them. The companion Web site, http://drupalfordummies.com was created using only the information presented in the book.

You can find out more about the book here:
Click for Drupal Association affiliate link to Amazon!

I'd love to hear from you with any comments or questions.

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With 2009 closing and 2010 coming, it is time to look back over our shoulder and see what a great year we had. And it is time to look ahead and predict where the future of Drupal will lead us to in 2010.

Lets start with looking back. Drupal turned eight and in CMS years this means we are young at heart while grownup in our soul.

At Dries' site, you can find a selection of sites that Dries found worthwhile mentioning, maybe because he liked the site, the implementation or the usage or the owner of the site can potentially influence other prospects to see the Drupal light. Let us take a look at that list and see what they have trends we can conclude from that list combined with the knowledge about our community.

Many big name sites switched to Drupal in 2009. In the media / entertainment market, some of the names include:

• Virgin, Slate, Monthy Python and Lucas Arts

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Over the last year, the redesign has been progressing with many infrastructure and feature improvements. We have had 6 drupal.org sprints in both Europe and North America. On January 8th, 2010 we are going to have a drupal.org redesign virtual sprint. Many members of the Drupal community and the drupal.org infrastructure team have participated in the redesign so far. In order to help complete the minimum viable redesign we've recruited 24 Drupal consulting companies to help implement the main redesign landing pages.

We specifically requested companies to sponsor pages because this part of the redesign required a broad range of skills including project management, content, design, theming, and development. We believed that sponsoring companies were used to marshaling a collection of resources to deliver sites to their customers. We believed these companies could scope, estimate, and deliver these redesign sections. While we've had 24 companies sponsor sections to date, we still require more sections of the site to be sponsored. If your Drupal company is interested in sponsoring a section please review the redesign implementers guide to understand how to contribute.

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GreatBrewers.com, a Drupal 6 site, powers BeerCloud, a mobile app available in the Android Market and iTunes App Store that helps you pair beer with food, track down your favorite beers in your neighborhood, and pull up a full description of any beer with a scan of its barcode. Whether you're a beer consumer who could use some guidance in making a well-educated purchase, a food lover who wants to discover new ways to enhance a meal with a suitable beer pairing, or a traveling beer enthusiast who wants to instantly map the closest stores, bars, and restaurants carrying one of your favorite beers, BeerCloud is the quintessential mobile beer app.

Great Brewers is powered by America’s leading network of beer passionate wholesalers that collectively represent the interests of the world’s best brewers by promoting education and awareness through shared resources. The mission of Great Brewers is to bridge the gap between the world’s great brewers and the consumers who enjoy their products, with a paramount focus on education and on enhancing beer distribution practices through the sharing of information.

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Genomeweb, a print and online publisher for the molecular biology research community, has successfully migrated its web site to Drupal. Cyrve built the Drupal site and migrated data into it from a legacy Microsoft SQL Server application. Drupal craftsmen Moshe Weitzman and Mike Ryan developed the site, and Maureen Lyons authored the theme.

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At 12.30pm on November 5th 2009, John E McGrath Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales (NTW) announced the company’s first year of work at a press briefing in Cardiff. It was simultaneously broadcast through video streaming to the world. Attracting nearly 3,000 internet users from all around the world, they joined staff, guests and artists that were in attendance at the live event, at the company’s shop/office at Castle Arcade, Cardiff.

NTW's first year of work intends to theatrically map Wales. Twelve shows over one year (plus an additional finale), will take place in locations across the country, bringing the very best of Welsh writing, performing and directing together with world class artists and world class ideas from across the globe.

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The San Francisco Drupal community is pleased to invite everyone to register for DrupalCon San Francisco to be held at the world-famous Moscone Center April 19th to 21st, 2010. Tickets are currently $195, but may increase in price. Register early to guarantee your place at the premier event of the Drupal community and experience firsthand its energy and momentum. This event is the best place to learn about Drupal 7 and the future of Drupal into 2010 and beyond.

DrupalCon San Francisco will feature three full days of sessions from the best and brightest in the Drupal community and Silicon Valley luminaries. The weekend before the conference we will also be hosting a Core Developer Summit (4/17), a Drupal Sprint and BOF Day (4/18), and professional Drupal training sessions (4/18). The traditional Code Sprint will happen the day after the conference (4/22). More details about the conference events and logistics can be found at http://sf2010.drupal.org.

San Francisco is a world-class city full of wonderful cuisine and culture. As home to Silicon Valley, it is one of the most technologically vibrant areas in the world. There are a lot of interesting things going on here and it is our pleasure to share our city with you and to invite everyone to attend DrupalCon San Francisco next April 19th to 21st, 2010.

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