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Earlier this week we have closed our special 80 Euro early bird offer with 335 registered participants! A great big thank you to all the people that already signed up!

With 8 more weeks to go we thought it was a good time to do some preliminary evaluation about our progress. We took the sign-up data from the past four Drupalcons and compared that with what we have so far. As was to be expected there has been some "nice action" in the last week of the first early bird offer. (Note that the registration was twice as long in Barcelona, so the numbers shown here are the sums from week 1 and 2; 3 and 4; 5 and 6).

We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC). Many months of work have gone into extensive rewrites of these modules, leading to major improvements that will make Drupal 6 an even more attractive platform for building websites.

As always, you should upgrade these modules on a test site first, and make sure to make a complete backup. You never know how your site's customizations will affect things, or what silly little thing nobody else caught.

More details about these pivotal module releases follow...

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Understanding Drupal is the first video in The Lullabot Learning Series. This video provides an overview of Drupal as a content management system, as a PHP web application framework, and as a developer community. Its documentary-style exploration covers all the terminology and fundamental concepts for both site administrators and developers. If you've ever been confused by Drupal or are still trying to wrap your head around the community and platform, this video is intended as a roadmap to accelerate your journey up the Drupal learning curve.

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The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students in the Research Methods class, taught by professor Kathryn Summers, have completed a usability study on Drupal. The Drupal community has been working with Becca Scollan in the usability group.

The usability research used video recordings and eye tracking tools to follow participants gaze in the Drupal interface. The study used eight participants, which is considered a valid sample. The study duplicated some tests done in usability testing at the University of Minnesota, and confirmed several results.

Drupalcon registration is running like crazy, 2 weeks after we opened the registration we are nearing 150 registered participants!

We got a lot of positive feedback from all over the community, especially for the registration system that Gábor Hojtsy and János Kuszing pieced together. This is what Dries said after he registered:

I had to share this: I just completed my DrupalCon Szeged registration. The conference organization and the registration system on the website are truly remarkable. Keep up the great work!

Several people told us that they were really pleased that they can book their hotel and shuttle bus from the Drupalcon site. Beware though, rooms are going really fast so if you want some choice you better be quick!

For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal's licensing status. Is it GPL version 2? Are we moving to GPL version 3? Could we even if we wanted to? Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]? As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.

When the site gets too busy, the infrastructure team sometimes disables the built-in search function. In an effort to cut down on the number of posts reporting this, I am linking to all the recent ones here and promoting this.

When it's down, you can always use Google. Just put "site:drupal.org" in your query.

This Wednesday we opened the registration for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 and some of the early birds are already in! If you sign up before the end of June you will be able to buy your ticket at the extra discounted price of 80 EUR. From July the price will increase to 120 EUR, from August on to 160 EUR and just before and during the conference it will be 200 EUR to attend. We also help you get a hotel room and buy shuttle bus tickets until July 24, so if you'd like to go the easy way, make sure to register by then.

SourceForge.Net is a site which strongly believes in Open Source and what it stands for, in much the same way as the Drupal Community. Every year they host a competition where their community votes for their favourite packages and this year is no different. After reading through the Program Information I cannot see any reason why we shouldn't try to get Drupal up there ("Any open source project of any kind can be nominated by anyone (yes, that means you!) to be a finalist in any category" - from their website).

On their site they say "This is for the prize" in regard to voting, however I'm not completely sure if the prize is simply winning or if there is some financial gain for the Drupal Association.

In preparation for a web seminar with Drupal local group organizers in the North and South American time zones on Monday June 9th 5PM PDT, I've updated a map with Drupal local groups. Full Map

Real map after the break.

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Developing new modules for Drupal 6? Porting older modules? Packt Publishing has just released a new book, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, by Matt Butcher. This book is targeted toward PHP programmers interested in Drupal 6 module development.

The book takes a hands-on approach. Each chapter walks through the development of a module, theme, or installation profile. As the reader progresses through the book, she or he will be able to create increasingly sophisticated Drupal modules.

If you're new to Drupal development (but have PHP development experience), this book will get you developing modules right away. Are you a more seasoned Drupal developer just looking to get some modules updated? This book focuses on many of the new features, changes, and improvements made in Drupal 6. Check out the sample chapter Creating Our First Module (1.3M PDF) to get a feel for how the book is written.

Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is Packt's new book, written by Michael Peacock, aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. With more and more websites aiming to integrate all of their components to give a more slick and streamlined effect for users - by using Drupal e-Commerce, the site and the store are already integrated providing both a powerful website and a powerful online store.

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[Update: pingVision won 5 Horizon Interactive awards. Details coming soon.]

Miami-based design firm studio:module picked up 4 awards last Friday from the Horizon Interactive Awards for sites it had built using Drupal 5.

Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Here's a list of the Drupal sites from studio:module that won:

HarvardScience
Gold award in the Magazine / News category
http://harvardscience.harvard.edu
Harvard case study

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Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

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We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.