You may already have heard of Packt, the fast-growing publisher of hardcopy and digital books on specific technologies, due to the large number of Drupal books it has published over the years. However, you may not be aware that they recently relaunched their website, www.PacktPub.com, using Drupal as its framework.

Packt Publishing is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. Packt has so far published over 15 Drupal books and remains committed to producing practical solution-based books for Drupal developers, along with the best available online bookstore. The new website, which took 12 months from design to launch, was developed with UK-based Bluetel Solutions. The new version not only adds to the existing functionality of Packt’s original website, but now also offers a new, enhanced customer experience with an advanced design.

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We are continuing to work to make DrupalCon Copenhagen as awesome as possible, but we wanted to take some time to give you an update on what we have been working on lately:

As you may have noticed, the deadline for submitting a session has been moved back to June 27th. Voting on the sessions opens on June 28th and closes on July 8th. We will notify all speakers and post the full schedule on July 18th. The votes for the different sessions will be used by the track chairs to inform their decision of which sessions get selected.

If your session isn't selected for one of the main conference tracks, please consider doing it as a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session instead. We will post more information about how to announce your BOF sessions as we get closer to the conference.

If you are not attending one of the training sessions on August 23rd, we would love to see you at the Unconference. This will be a perfect opportunity to connect with the local open source community and to discuss issues outside of the Drupal-sphere. The Unconference will be run BarCamp-style and it will be free to attend, but please register in advance to help us determine how much coffee we need to brew.

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PitBulls.org is a community and information site centered around the American Pit Bull Terrier, usually referred to as Pit Bulls.

Pit Bulls get a lot of coverage in the media, usually negative, because there is rampant fear of the breed. They are also often the target of Breed Specific Legislation (BSL). PitBulls.org aims to share another perspective, those of passionate Pit Bull owners. The main mission of the site is to convey that Pit Bulls make great family pets, to get the word out that a dog is only a reflection how it is treated and raised, and to provide a central hub where owners can connect and share their pictures and stories.

The site was conceived and developed by PropDrop Web Development and Marketing. PropDrop not only does client work, but also performs web niche analysis and develops in-house web properties based on that research in order to gain market share in a wide variety of areas. PitBulls.org is one of these properties. It also doesn't hurt that we are dog lovers and own a Pit Bull/Lab mix named Bauer, so we are our own audience in some sense.

PropDrop uses Drupal exclusively for its in-house projects, because we can create a community and information site with some advanced features in under 2 weeks, with everything optimized for search with little effort. It also gives us the opportunity to expand a site's feature set in the future without interfering with current functionality, taking a site in directions that might not be possible with other content management systems.

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Act now if you want to get your DrupalCon Copenhagen ticket at the current price of €249. On June 28th at 8am CEST the ticket price will go up to €279.

Go to the conference site to buy your ticket for the conference, which will be held August 23-27.

Your ticket includes:

• 90 sessions spread out over 3 days
• Ad hoc BOF (birds of a feather) sessions
• Access to pre- and post-conference code and documentation sprints
• Access to the coder lounge where you can hang out and code when you're not attending sessions
• Access to fooBar, the official bar of DrupalCon Copenhagen
• …and, last but not least, a chance to meet your fellow Drupalers

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Drupal 6.17, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system, is now available for download. There are no security fixes in this release. Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is recommended. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

Highlights of changes in this release include improvements of session cookie handling, better processing of big XML-RPC payloads, improved PostgreSQL compatibility, better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility, improved Japanese support in search module, better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation and improved logging for login failures. An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved. In total there were about 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6.

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The Dutch language website FondswervingOnline.nl (or "Fundraising Online") is the largest online fundraising and subsidies database in the Netherlands. The website offers businesses and NGO’s access to a community with the latest public data on subsidies, sponsorship opportunities, government funding, private investors, prizes, microcredits and more.

The initial goal of the project was to build the best possible website in its niche. We looked at Efactor.com (an entrepreneur community) for inspiration and we asked ourselves if it were possible build a similar community with Drupal. We believe it can! Our registered users have access to a mini-Facebook profile with status and activity updates. Based on the user preferences, members with identical interests are matched and can find each other, for example to cooperate in a joint fundraising application. Community pages and a forum are available to share user interests.

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Our fourth Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the fifth alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes many critical bug fixes, especially around the upgrade path, security issues, JavaScript, performance, and other areas.

Please see the release notes for more details.

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. On or about June 21, 2010 we will create a new official Drupal 7 release. If this list is fixed, it will be a beta release. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

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Dahon, headquartered in Los Angeles, California, is a globally renowned folding bike manufacturer. The company has offices in the US, Taiwan, and China, and sells its unique range of folding bicycles and accessories in over 30 countries worldwide. Dahon recently relaunched its online presence with a beautiful new website developed by Philadelphia based Drupal shop, Zivtech. The following is a run-down of how Zivtech developed the site to meet Dahon's usability and functionality requirements.

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You can now submit your session proposals for DrupalCon Copenhagen, which will be held August 23-27. The conference will feature the following tracks:

• Introducing Drupal
• Theming, Design & Usability
• Code & Development
• Configuration, Set-Up & Performance
• Drupal for Business
• Providing Professional Drupal Services

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WikiJob is the UK's largest graduate jobs website. Founded in 2007 on an untidy mixture of vBulletin and Mediawiki, it ported over to Drupal in 2008.

Since moving to Drupal, the site has grown exponentially. WikiJob now receives 250k monthly unique visitors and delivers over 1.5 million monthly page views. For the two founders (Chris (myself) & Ed), this has meant a quick rise as a business, from working in our bedrooms to offices in Central London. WikiJob is currently a team of five, and is likely to grow to be a team of ten by the end of 2010. In months April - Dec 2009, we billed £102,000 in advertising. This year, we hope to bill over £500,000.

Drupal has been a key ingredient to our success. The unique power of Drupal is that it allows one person to single-handedly accomplish the work of a team of web developers, with very little code. Anyone with the time can make an awesome web site.

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Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 5 is available now!

Our third Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the fourth alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes many critical bug fixes and other improvements, including:

• Color module now usable by themes other than Garland.
• Usability improvements including re-weightable roles and saner Forum module defaults.
• A variety of optimizations made to data import-related functions to make migrations faster.
• Lots of previously missing documentation for hooks has now been documented. Hooray!
• Increased test coverage, particularly core Tokens.
• Lots of smaller bug fixes, security patches, and improvements.

Please see the release notes for more details.

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. Our next release will be on or about May 21, 2010. If the upgrade path is working, and all known security issues are fixed, this will be a beta. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have 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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Drupal is excited to announce that we have 18 amazing projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. This is the sixth year that Drupal has participated in the program, bringing the total investment made by Google in Drupal through the SoC to over $450,000. This investment has resulted in numerous modules and core improvements, but more importantly it has brought in many long time contributors to the drupal project and helped keep numerous other contributors engaged and active in the community.

This year's Summer of Code projects focus on integrating Drupal with other APIs, improving and updating popular contributed modules, improving security, and helping to build new functionalities that will help keep Drupal at the cutting edge. Some of the projects still require co-mentors, and we'll be trying to connect these students with the community in a real world setting, so if you're interested in helping out with community bonding or code review, or even if you just want to keep tabs on the SoC progress, join us over at the Summer of Code group - it's not too late for you to help out!

Please help us in thanking Google for their support of Drupal and all Free & Open Source Software projects, and please welcome our Summer of Code 2010 Students.

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Open Source has seen a lot of adoption from the US government in the last year. David Cole, from the New Media Team at the White House, will introduce the DrupalCon Keynote by talking about the decision to move Whitehouse.gov to Drupal and their future plans to use Drupal and open source to foster citizen engagement. Other panelists will discuss their experiences working with Drupal and open source in government.

What questions do you have for this panel? http://goo.gl/mod/cZPS

Open Source in Government: A Panel Discussion
Panel:
David H. Cole, Executive Office of the President
Andrew Hoppin, CIO NY State Senate

Moderator: Michael Walsh, Forum One Communications

Open Source in Government: A Panel Discussion
Live broadcast time: 13:30 - 14:45 (GMT -7) Wednesday, 21 Apr 2010
Submit questions or vote: http://goo.gl/mod/cZPS
Live Video Stream: http://www.drupal.org.uk/news/drupalvolcon-uk-2010

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The DrupalCon European organizing group and the Danish Drupal Community is pleased to invite everyone to register for DrupalCon Copenhagen, which will be held at the world-famous Bella Center August 23rd to 27th, 2010.

For the next three days (through April 21st), you can take advantage of the special DrupalCon to DrupalCon price for 249€ including lunches and snacks! Register now to guarantee your place at the premier event of the Drupal community. DrupalCon Copenhagen will feature three full days of sessions from the best and brightest in the Drupal community. The session days will be bookended by code sprints and professional Drupal training sessions.

Copenhagen is a world-class city full of wonderful cuisine and culture. We have arranged for special pricing at hotels and hostels and of course there will be plenty of parties!

The price for early-bird tickets will go up to 279€ on Thursday, April 22nd. All tickets are subject to Danish VAT.

Thanks to Brightcove and the DrupalCon San Franciso Organizing Committee, Dries Buytaert's State of Drupal keynote will be streamed live from the main stage of DrupalCon San Francisco beginning at 1:30 PM PDT (GMT -7) on Monday. Please join us at http://sf2010.drupal.org/keynote/live to watch Dries share his assessment of where we are and vision of where we are going. The keynotes from Tim O'Reilly on Tuesday, and Dave Cole from the White House on Wednesday will also be streamed.

Sparkeo is a new video course creation platform that launched its private beta at Le Web 09 (one of the world's largest Web conferences, that takes place each year in Paris) and generated buzz when it was recently featured on Techcrunch and other blogs.

Sparkeo is a video platform for knowledge entrepreneurs that enables them to create a business by creating, promoting and selling video courses leveraging their expertise. Sparkeo provides a complete toolset for the monetization and creation of interactive courses.

Sparkeo is not a destination Web site but a platform where users can create their courses and take them anywhere over the Web as a stand-alone video player. This will allow the content creators to be where their paying audience and students might be, such as blogs, Web sites or any social network. One of the most important features of this solution is the inclusion of a portable payment solution which enables the user to purchase directly from the player itself, anywhere it’s embedded.

One of the interesting things about the product that we created for Sparkeo is that through its evolution as a project we identified it as a perfect example of the benefits of building a platform under Drupal because it covers almost all of the sales pitches that we (at Linnovate) use with our potential customers.

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One of the more intricate websites recently completed by ISL Consulting is the grant submission site, Entelligence built for Jobson Healthcare Information (JHI) in New York. The premise of the site is familiar to many, especially in the non-profit world: users register on the site and submit an initial proposal (this site accepts grant proposals from young scientists for research in cardiopulmonary medicine).

There are strict deadlines for submission. These are evaluated in detail by a Steering Committee (SC). Deliberations are managed by a Chairman, who assigns reviewers and collates the rankings and comments from SC members online. These are confidential until a final, simultaneous online/offline voting meeting that determines the winners. As the function of the site shifts, the administrative interface changes.

The website’s behavior also shifts substantially for applicants and judges depending on the grant submission stage.

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Florida DrupalCamp 2010 held just outside of Orlando was the largest Drupal-related gathering the Sunshine state has ever seen. The February 20-21 event pulled in more than 175 attendees from Florida and the US, more than $5,000 in sponsorships, and generated a lot of interest in regional community building throughout Florida. Anecdotal input and a formal survey indicate the weekend was an unqualified success. In the spirit of open-source, this case study provides other DrupalCamp organizers insight into planning and organizing a worthwhile DrupalCamp, from early planning through follow-up participant surveys.

FDC10 was the culmination of a strong effort by the Florida Drupal User's Group, local companies, and generous sponsors. It was unique in many ways, including the number and diversity of the participants as well as how the event was organized. The weekend was less of a "barcamp" style event and more of a mini-DrupalCon, with almost all sessions pre-determined, and several generous sponsorships covering plenty of food and swag for all attendees who paid a minimal registration fee of $5.

The weekend featured a full day of sessions divided into three tracks based on experience level, including one dedicated to beginners to introduce users to the Drupal platform and sow the seeds for growing the community. The second day was Coding for A Cause, a coding sprint among 40 volunteer developers of all skill levels that built operational sites for two deserving, PR-savvy, Florida not-for profit organizations.

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BookTeller.com is a subscription-based online library for animated and narrated children's books, available in both English and Chinese. Currently, there are over 200 books available for subscribers and more are being added. Its goals are to help parents and educators teach children how to read and to get them reading more often by giving them books that are both engaging and fun.

Besides being an online library, it is also a platform for authors and publishers who wish to transform their work into animated books and to monetize them. For that, we have a revenue sharing program and a team of award-winning animators to help out with the animation.

The consumer-facing website is used for, among other things, showcasing what books are in the library and to handle registrations/payments. The books are accessed via a client reader based on Adobe's AIR platform, which must be downloaded and installed.

The following is our experience in building out the website using Drupal. I hope it is useful as another example of what's possible.

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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!

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