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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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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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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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.

Single sign on problems:
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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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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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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Note: this has now been deployed on drupal.org. See the announcement post: Fully packaged Drupal distributions now deployed on drupal.org.
Since the 5.0 release, Drupal core has included an installer that supports installation profiles to setup and configure a site for a certain use-case. In theory this allows for people to create a better «out of the box» solution by configuring Drupal like a wiki, a conference, or a publishing site. If done right, installation profiles have the potential to help end-users get sites done faster and accelerate the adoption of Drupal. However, this promise has yet to be realized, and this core Drupal feature is currently being vastly underutilized.
As part of their grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Deproduction and Quiddities want to help realize the benefit that install profiles have to offer. The Drupal Association, with the support of individual and corporate sponsors, has put forth a matching grant to help see that it meets its mission of supporting the Drupal project. The potential to help address the usability problems of people trying to get started with Drupal is truly enormous.
Read on for details on how installation profiles work, why they are important, how packaging them will help, and the technical decisions behind the way the packaging scripts will work. Now is the chance to provide feedback which might make it into the code before it goes live by the end of November.
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Trócaire is a leading Irish overseas development agency that works with amazing people to bring about positive and lasting changes in some of the world’s poorest places. Last year, Trócaire spent over €60 million on 124 programmes across 38 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Their programmes are carried out with partner organisations so local people drive the whole process and, in turn, their own development.
The programmes aim to:

Build a reliable way of life and help people cope with climate change
Respond to emergencies and disasters
Tackle injustice and defend human rights
Address the HIV and AIDS crisis
Support gender equality

Trócaire's annual 'Lent campaign' is the single largest fundraising campaign in Ireland and enjoys huge support from the Irish public each year. Trócaire's website www.trocaire.org has become a key fundraising tool for the organisation and an essential way to show supporters the impact of its work and increase awareness.
Annertech built the Trócaire site using Drupal 6 and many contributed modules. In general, we used Migrate to pull in the data from the existing CMS, CCK to build the content, Views to list it, and Panels to arrange the items on a page. For example, the home page is a panel page containing several mini-panels, views and other blocks.
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Packt Publishing, the company behind many well-known Drupal books, holds an annual Open Source CMS Award that recognizes open source content management platforms and their communities. In addition to bragging rights, winners also receive financial support for their projects in the form of cash prizes. Drupal has historically done very well in this competition, winning the overall award for the last two years running, as well as Best PHP Open Source Content Management System in last year's competition. This record of success is a tribute to the strength and passion of the Drupal community, as the awards are partially decided by popular vote.
In fact, Drupal has done so well in past years that the organizers of this year's award have retired it from eligibility for the overall award, instead pitting it against Joomla! in an all-new Hall of Fame category. In addition, they've created a Drupal Award to allow community members to vote fortheir favorite modules and themes. And if that wasn't enough, Drupal is also eligible for the Best Open Source PHP CMS award. All told, around $6,000 in prize money is at stake.
How can you help Drupal win again this year? Just go to Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award Web site before October 30 and cast your vote in the following categories:

Hall of Fame
Best Open Source PHP CMS
Drupal Award

And to provide a little extra incentive, three voters who go to the site and fill out a brief survey will also win a free iPod Touch.
Show your support for Drupal and vote today!
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