TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History campaign. GCCA's brand is TckTckTck, to indicate that "time is running out" and the web is at the core of GCCA's strategy.

With over 50 diverse and established NGO partners driving the bus, their own unique mandate as a central unifying force, GCCA had to balance two competing yet interconnected elements. First, supporting partners, ensuring they fill a unique role; adding value and always supporting, not competing with partner interests. Second, direct public engagement: providing a strong, unifying global center-point for media and world leaders; organizing new supporters who aren't reached by an existing NGO partner, and supporting new partners who have low online organizing engagement capacity.

The partner organizations are all running their own independent campaigns but using the TckTckTck brand, pointing to the website, and together, in less than a week, they aggregated nearly 1,000,000 supporters to the cause!

Advomatic built the TckTckTck site with Drupal 6 and several staple contributed modules. In general, we used CCK to build the content, Views to list the content, and Panels to arrange the lists on a page. For instance, the home page is a panel page with several Views blocks pulling in content.

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It's nearly 6 months since the release of Cracking Drupal, which makes for a nice milestone to talk about the book and mention a few related developments. Cracking Drupal was written by me (Greg Knaddison - or "greggles") with reviews and assistance from various members of the community with the well-known Károly Négyesi (chx) as the main technical editor.

The book's target audience is broad: site admins who know a little coding, developers who are deep in module development and selection, and front end developers (aka themers) who modify their template.php and tpl.php files.

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The Saint Louis Review is a local Catholic diocesan newspaper serving the nearly 500,000 member Archdiocese of Saint Louis. The newspaper has had a website since the late 90s, which was ported to a custom-designed CMS in 2001. The PHP/MySQL-based site ran quite well throughout the first decade of this millennium, but was in need of either a serious overhaul or a redesign, to go along with the paper's new tabloid layout in April 2009.

The decision was made in 2007 to port the website to Joomla, but after a few months, a new editor, and more work, it was determined that, due to its extensibility, flexible out-of-the-box permissions, and standards/SEO-compliant codebase, Drupal would be a better fit for the site. Work was begun in January of 2009 to transfer the custom CMS' articles database (over 17,000 articles) to a Drupal site, create a new template based off the colors and design of the new tabloid-format paper, and integrate an easier-to-manage ad system and back-end.

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There's lots of exciting news about Groups.Drupal.org which was launched over three years ago as a

a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups.

Three years since and there are almost 650 groups on the site and over 51,000 subscriptions to those groups with over 700,000 page views each month. A glorious hub indeed.

Many users will now enjoy the magic "single sign on" from bakery, but some accounts couldn't be synched automatically. If you have problems logging in to the site please follow the instructions on the account synch request form.

Along with the redesign and upgrade happening for drupal.org, Groups.Drupal.org is being upgraded. Moshe Weitzman is leading the charge on this effort. Moshe has decided that this upgrade makes a good point to pass along some maintenance responsibilities for the site to Josh Koenig and Greg Knaddison.

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Web designers have taken to blogging platforms as a foundation for their portfolio websites. It has always bothered me since, as a web designer, I believe in user-centered design. Blogging systems are not ideal for showcasing a portfolio, as it’s coming at the project from the perspective of “what’s easy to build and how can we fit what we want into it?”

I think a lot of designers feel overwhelmed by Drupal, because of all the capability and power it has. But Drupal is capable of not just managing newspapers and portals – Drupal can easily and efficiently handle small-time operations, as well.

I knew I needed to redesign my own website, www.headlinercreative.com, and I was determined to use Drupal. I approached the project like any client’s website, starting from the very beginning: figuring out the goals and purpose of the website, figuring out what content I wanted to display and the best way to display it. I wanted something that would be easy for me to use and update, and that would be intuitive for visitors to view my work and participate in blog discussions. I knew that whatever I came up with, Drupal would handle it superbly.

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As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic.com, the first venture backed start-up to use Drupal, was acquired by the Clarity Digital Group which owns and operates Examiner.com a quantified top 100 web property for local news and information. Over the next ~6 months we'll be migrating Examiner.com to the NowPublic Drupal based platform, creating one of the largest public Drupal installs on the planet!

While we at NowPublic have been blessed with a loyal, dedicated, and amazing team that continues to impress me on a daily basis, and fortunate enough to have great advisers, the unsung hero of this story that I want to publicly thank is everyone who has contributed to Drupal, and the Drupal community - without you all this would not have been possible. Drupal the software, and the Drupal community have been critical to the success of NowPublic.com from the very beginning.

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Packt Publishing is pleased to announce the release of a new Drupal book called Drupal 6 Site Blueprints authored by Timi Ogunjobi. This is a project-oriented book that provides readers with a starting foundation for 12 powerful Drupal Web site projects that can be tailored to their needs, including community functionality, blog networks, e-commerce stores, photo sharing, Google mashups, and so on..

Packt Publishing is also pleased to offer a 15% discount to any Drupal.org user. To purchase this book with this discount, simply purchase Drupal 6 Site Blueprints through Packt Publishing, and provide the code Dru6SBto. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

This book is aimed at Drupal users in the following categories:

• Students seeking hands-on experience building useful PHP-based Web projects using a rapid development environment.
• Hobbyists looking to build rich Web applications for personal and business use or for their clubs or society.
• Business owners who would like to test the Drupal platform and to see if it meets their immediate and future business needs for a Web application.
• Professionals who like to quickly present prototypes of new Web projects to their clients.

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Drupal 6.14 and 5.20, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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After some 82 weeks of development beginning in February 2008, no one should be caught by surprise that we are in a code freeze for a release of Drupal 7, the next and best release of Drupal yet. However, as we all know, some of the best patches always happen at the last minute, and there are always last-minute patches that must happen. As part of my State of Drupal presentation at DrupalCon Paris last week, I talked about the Drupal 7 code freeze. Since not all of us could be in Paris, I wanted to share the relevant slides (PDF, 85 KB) in this post.

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The Drupal Association has taken the first steps in implementing its new events plan. In this first phase, we will be working to schedule DrupalCons two years in advance, and we have established regional groups to manage this process. We have committed to adding a third annual DrupalCon that will float between regions not currently served by the European and North American Cons.

The Regional Organizing Groups are open to any interested party in the community, and free to choose their own structure and governance. They will select cities, choose local teams, and create programs for future DrupalCons. Australian, European, North American and South American Groups are forming or have formed and can be found on http://groups.drupal.org.

We are making these changes because DrupalCons are growing just as the Drupal community is growing and we expect that growth to continue and accelerate. We have committed to making DrupalCon available to anyone who wants to attend them, and this means that we need to select appropriate venues and work hard to be efficient in order to keep the ticket price affordable. The Drupal Events Plan is a work in progress and is available online for your review.

We are committed to having DrupalCons that serve the entire community while maintaining the sense of community that has been the hallmark of DrupalCon. You can become involved by joining the Drupal Association, taking part in a regional group and in your local Drupal group.

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DrupalCon Paris 2009 is over and we want to have your feedback, whether you attended the event or couldn't make it this time around.

You are the ones, that can help us make DrupalCon your conference, by simply filling out this survey.
We have lots of questions for you and you have the answers to them!

This is for you, so help make future DrupalCons, including DrupalCon San Francisco 2010, April 18-20th, even better!

In early 2009, The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) embarked on a website redevelopment project with Context, a web development firm based just outside of Philadelphia.

With over 7,000 members and an expansive website consisting of hundreds of pages ranging from informational tutorials to event registration to their national "Find a Photographer" service, the ASMP had quite a project in front of them, and were looking for guidance in determining which system would be able to meet their requirements.

After reviewing the ASMP's 11 page request-for-proposal and the wonderfully clean and organized designs provided by Chicago's Grillo Group, Context decided that Drupal was the only CMS that would make the project practical.

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Just a week to go, and we are busy, frenetically working on the last details to get you the coolest, most fun, most informative Drupal Conference ever. We cannot but express our regrets to those who will not be able to join us: know that we have worked hard to get you as much video coverage as possible, so you can still follow the conference.

As you all may know, organizing an event of this stature is no easy deal and we are fully expecting to still meet bumps on the road in the next seven days but.. we know that with your support we'll be able to surmount anything. God willing, this time Wi-fi will work :)

So, some additional information about how well this is going:

• There will be over 850 people in attendance from all over the world.
• We have a line up of 82 sessions lead by members of the Drupal community, not counting the dozens of BoF sessions.
• We have 42 sponsors (6 Platinum, 2 Gold, 12 Silver, and 22 Bronze) representing Drupal service providers and corporate users including major national and international software and media companies with familiar sponsors like MTV and Microsoft.
• There are still two opportunities left for your company to be a sponsor (Gold and Silver), you will not be on the printed materials but, we will get you the exposure both at the venue and online, remember: benefits from the sponsorship go to furthering the Drupal community if interested, hurry and use the contact form on the conference website.
• We have a great job fair lined up with the top Drupal service providers hiring from the best and the brightest developers and business persons the community has to offer.
• We have added DrupalCampParis4 to the first day of Drupalcon! Please sign up online on the Barcamp website.
• Lastly, we have sold 25 of the 30 remaining late registration tickets. There are only 5 tickets left! If you are interested in attending Drupalcon Paris and need a ticket, please purchase one today before they are all sold out.

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SportBusiness Group is the world's leading supplier of information, media and B2B marketing services to the sports industry and, with its network of partners and agents, assists companies from all over the globe in achieving their business goals.

The latest incarnation (site version 11, 3rd Drupal version) of the Sportbusiness.com website has finally brought us into the world of Drupal 6. We initially moved the site over to Drupal almost 3 years ago (back in the Drupal 4.7 days) after months of data conversion from a proprietry Oracle-based CMS. We've never looked back. The upgrade to Drupal 6 has just finished; the site has been redesigned and several major changes have been implemented.

Getting up to 10,000 page impressions a day certainly doesn't make this a high-traffic site by comparison to some of the other sites we have at Electric Word plc (parent company to SportBusiness), but the visitors to the site demand equally high levels of quality and content. This was something we had to maintain from previous releases.

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Origo is an open, modular and extensible software development, management and distribution platform. Aimed at software developers, Origo provides a set of services for combining, integrating and facilitating the development process over a network. Origo provides services like source control management, issue tracking, statistics, release hosting, wiki, blog and features for communicating and networking with other developers. An extensive API can be used to integrate Origo into other applications and development processes.

Origo was conceived as a research project of the Software Engineering chair at ETH Zürich, and has resulted in several theses. Recently ownership was transferred into an ETH spinoff, Oriact.

Released in August 2007, the platform as of August 2009 hosts 3,000 projects with over 6,500 developers worldwide.

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The University of Prince Edward Island is a public university located in Charlottetown, PEI on the east coast of Canada. This project is the second phase of our build of Drupal at the university. In it we are hoping to use our theming layer to provide context for clients who may be lost around our various multisite installations. We are also considering how to effectively repurpose the content that we are creating on our main website to make an interesting and effective mobile site.

We've been using Drupal full-time at the university for two years now and it has actually shrunk to 'only' a 100 database multisite installation. All development, maintenance, design and conceptual/marketing consultation are done by our little shop of three at Integrated Communications. Our clients on campus are responsible for the content on their own sites. The project's lead is Dave Cormier, our lead Drupal developer is Yuxing Huang, and our all 'round client services/Drupal guy is Shawn Arsenault.

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Over the last few years the Drupal project has been evolving its relationship with hosting companies and the hosting industry.

As part of our ongoing outreach efforts, the Drupal community is having a Drupal booth at Hostingcon, in Washington DC, on August 10-12th. Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh Hosting, is staffing the Drupal booth and doing a presentation about Drupal on the expo floor to the Hostingcon attendees. If you are in the DC area, the conference is running for 2 more days.

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The Drupal community is alive with meetups, user groups, and camps. However, there isn't a published formula on using Drupal to accomplish the needs of a large meetup, camp, or convention. This By Them worked with LA Drupal organizers to design and develop what we hope will be a useful camp formula for others, available for download under the GPL.

DrupalCampLA.com was built on Drupal 6 using core & contributed modules to handle event registration, sponsorship management, featured speakers, user bio's, and session proposals. The website features an attendee driven event schedule where members propose sessions and only registered members pick which sessions they'd like to see (in the BarCamp style). Planning the schedule for the day of events has been made flexible enough to allow organizers to maintain a master schedule with ease. Not to mention that all attendees get their own schedule view with the sessions they pick.

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In heavy testing of the proposed update of the automated testing infrastructure, we decided it was not yet ready to deploy. However, the other code we wanted to upgrade was successfully installed and the database updates ran without error. Therefore, the downtime really went from 12:47am until 1:09am UTC on Friday 2009-08-14. We're sorry it started late, but the extra testing allowed us to avoid trouble that would have led to an even longer window with the site off-line.

Unfortunately, most of the new code isn't very end-user visible, so there's not much to point at on the upgraded site to show off. But, it's going to let us roll out more changes and new features in the future (without needing to take the site offline).

Thanks again for your patience and understanding, and please accept our apologies for the late start.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, located in Milton, Delaware, is one of the 25 largest microbrewers in North America. Starting in 1995, Dogfish Head went from a backroom operation of three little kegs with propane burners underneath to a full-fledged brewery and bottling powerhouse. They ship and sell beer in over 30 states, are currently expanding their brewery, branching out with restaurant franchises, and continue to grow.

The Dogfish Head brand prides itself on a ‘do it yourself’, ‘off-centered’, grassroots style work ethic. When it came time for them to choose a company to build their website, they chose another ‘off-centered’ company, Inclind Inc, not too far from the brewery.

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