Planet Drupal

The Drupal 5 beta release is now available for testing: http://drupal.org/drupal-5.0-beta1

A message from Dries this morning said only 3 critical bugs at this time and the chances are good that 5.0 will require fewer betas/RCs than 4.7.

Upgrades are always such mixed blessings. Great new features but the thought of site upgrades isn't appealing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

One thing about the Vancouver Drupalier meetings, I'm never quite sure what to expect. Last night's meeting was the least technical so far and a lot of fun. Here are some notes with stuff left out to protect both the innocent and the guilty . . . . .

The last Drupal Vancouver meet up proved an interesting buffet of different things. I didn't take notes, but here is a list of things still lingering in my brain:

• DrupalCon Brussels Review, including:
  - discussions of new Drupal 5 features
  - the Drupal Association
  - Walkah's presentation explaining the infamous Pants module
• Massoud presented an overview of his Asterix billing module
• New Drupal sites released into the wild
• “Stump the Drupal Ninjas” - A Q&A session of “how would I implement function/feature x”
  Joking aside, these are incredibly useful. Drupal is so feature rich and new modules are coming on the scene regularly enough I always walk away with some useful tidbits of information, whether I'm looking for them or not. Some of the topics:
  - A discussion of online payment options
  - Mapping options
  - Forum options

This meeting was one of our longer ones, with discussion taking us late enough there wasn't time to adjourn to other environs.

Richard Erikson posted a great set of notes from the August Drupal meetup: Notes from August 24th Vancouver Drupal User's Group.

I had a great time at the Vancouver Python Workshop. Kudo's and thanks to the organizers and sponsors.

Arrrr, thar be comments on deck! (Sorry, getting in practice for Talk Like a Pirate Day).

Thanks to the anti-spam power of Akismet and the coding prowess of Markus Petrux at phpMiX.org I feel comfortable enabling comments.

Local Vancouver company Bryght has scored a heavy hitter in the Drupal community. Steven Wittens announced in his blog he is moving to Vancouver to become a "Bryght Guy". Steven is one of the original Drupal developers and until February the only other core committer besides Drupal creator Dries

The next Vancouver Drupal meeting is Thursday July 20th. Information at Drupal Groups site. There's going to be some really interesting presentations - Excellent!

Some folks at IBM liked Drupal and wrote about it!

In Part 1 of a series titled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site IBM authors Alister Lewis-Bowen, Stephen Evanchik and Louis Weitzman (apparently no relation to Drupal communities Moshe Weitzman) outline how they came to select Drupal. While I've never used Mambo or Typo3, the Drupal information is dead on to my experience. They also look at the blog oriented Movable Type, Word Press and TextPattern, and throw in Ruby on Rails for good measure.

The article is on the IBM developerWorks website: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/. It's definitely worth a read if you're interested in an overview of some of the currently popular content management systems.

Just over a week ago I went to summer camp! Drupal Camp Seattle 2006 to be precise.

There were no three legged races or pie eating contests, though I suppose a brave soul could have taken a swim in Lake Union. This was a group of 40 or so technical and non-technical people getting together to learn about Drupal (Hint: This site runs on Drupal).

In spite of 40 laptop computers in a heritage building with marginal Internal access and no air conditioning on a hot day there was great energy in the room. Some of the nicest people are using Drupal for some very cool websites.