One month ago today we opened registration for DrupalCon DC and launched the conference website, and wow, a lot has happened since. So far, 685 people have registered for DrupalCon, putting the conference on path to being the best attended Drupal event yet. If you haven't bought your ticket yet there are just over 100 left at the $200 rate and then prices will increase to $250.

It's been amazing to see how excited people are about DrupalCon DC, and that goes beyond just registering for it. Over 100 potential sessions have been submitted by the community, plus an additional 20 BoFs. Voting on sessions is open and active, so cast your vote for the ones you're most interested in. If you'd like to present a session, submit it soon - the submission deadline is December 10. Also, 165 websites have been swagged with DrupalCon badges helping us get the word out to more people, and 31 t-shirt designs have been submitted.

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Have you ever been on a social networking site, let’s say Facebook for example, and it gave you an option to invite all your friends from your gmail or yahoo email account? You ever wondered how you would build something like that on your own social site? Maybe on your blog or maybe your own social network? OpenInviter is an open source php class written in PHP5 that does just that. It allows users to import contacts from most of the well known email providers and social networks.

Right now OpenInviter currently supports these providers:

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Todays marks the release of Asset 1.0 for Drupal 5 and the first development release for Drupal 6. Many thanks go out to Rue89 and their complete dev team with Damien Cirotteau as their tech lead. They upgraded the module to Drupal 6 and contributed it all back to the community. Thank you!

Please note that the current dev version is pre-alpha and is more a starting point for people who want to jump in and help coding than for actual use. You can get the stable D5 and dev D6 version on the asset module project page.

Belgium.be, the official website of Belgium, is using Drupal at http://forum2010.belgium.be. This forum site has been put together in preparation for our Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2010.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect is the fact that the site was built in less than 10 days. The Chancellorship of the Prime Minister picked Connexion to build this site with the help of Internet Architects.

The site is available in 4 languages so all Belgian citizens can express their opinions and engage in interactive discussions about European issues.

Marketing is sometimes the toughest part of starting a company. It won't matter if you have a great idea, product, service, or blog in my case, if you can't reach your target audience and make it as easy as possible for people to find you. One of the quickest ways of building traffic to your site is via blogging. It is also a perfect way to start building an audience before you even launch by writing about the industry you seek to enter, providing valuable information, or just simply writing about your experience starting your company. Blogging has exploded and even seeping into the corporate world. Did you know GE just launched their corporate blog ? In many ways blogging is starting to mold a new era where transparency, free information, and daily communication between companies and public are critical to build brands and companies that people are attracted to.

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I don't get a lot of fan mail. But I'm pretty sure I just got the world's best intentioned, but poorly thought out, fan letter:

Love yer site, your Drupal work, and omfg, you're even into the Ubuntu doc-team. I think that is the grandest, and I'll likely gawk atcha in DC during DrupalCon where a 3D screensaver / wallpaper, and general graphic homage will be born out due to a slick time lapse photo montage shall ensue, et. al. ;->
Keep on rockin' in the free world. :-)

The identity of this person will forever be known to only two people (me and "him"), so please don't ask. Although I am a little bit creeped out by this email, this Public Service Announcement isn't about making anyone feel uncomfortable. (I've sent my fair share of weird emails that have been fuelled by inside jokes and caffeine and not at all fuelled by sanity, so I'm hardly one to judge. This person has gotten a quick reply back and knows how I feel about the email.) 

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Honestly, it feels crazy early for me to be submitting session proposals to a conference four months out. I was motivated by the reminder that the deadline is nearing to get our Ubercart session proposals up on the site for folks to scope out and vote into being. If you haven't posted your proposals yet (not counting BoF sessions), get on it! The deadline is December 10th.

I'll be teaming up with Lyle, the other core Uberdev, and the rest of Team Ubercart to present a couple of sessions:

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Trellon seems to be facing more and more projects where our customers need to make a decision on which content management system to use for their web properties. We work with open source technologies and have vast Drupal expertise so we can assist with the decision to use Drupal as the underlying content management system for Web properties vs. a proprietary program. Here we will lay out the pros and cons of each so that you, the reader will have a better understanding of the optimal direction for your firm. The good news is that Drupal and other open source content management systems are being considered in more and more enterprise (think large) installations due to the fact that their value is so high. Open source content management systems like Drupal, Joomla and Mambo, all offer significant functionality with no software costs or licensing fees.

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Hotel Harrington - located just seven blocks from DrupalCon DC - has a great deal on hotel rooms. You can get a single room for $109 a night, or a room for two (two twin beds) for $135 a night. Other types of rooms are also available at great prices. There are only 40 rooms still available in the hotel, so book yours fast!

This is a great price for a hotel room located in downtown Washington, DC, and it's just a short walk to the conference and to many restaurants, bars, shops, and tourist hang outs. Hotels can get quite expensive, so I recommend booking now. I'll post other deals as I find them too, so follow us here or on twitter if you miss this deal.

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Drupal 6 supports translation of content with the core Content Translation module. So you can create a page in English, then translate the page to Dutch.

But what if you attach a file to the English page? It does not show up on your Dutch translation. And what if you are using CCK and FileField? That's the case that I want to cover in this article.

First, I installed Drupal 6.6, enabled the Locale module, and added the Dutch translation (for the proper way of installing translations, see Addison Berry's screencast, Installing Drupal with a Translation).

I installed CCK 6.x-2.1 and enabled the Content module and some others (Node Reference, Number, Text, Option Widgets).

I installed the 6.x3.x-dev snapshot of FileField (it's better to use an actual release but I saw some bug fixes going into the module and figured I'd test it). I enabled FileField module.

I enabled the core Content Translation module.

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On Friday, December 5 at 11am Pacific (California) time, join Lullabots Jeff Eaton and James Walker for an O'Reilly webcast: Everything You Wanted to Know about Drupal but were Afraid to Ask. The content of this webcast is mainly geared toward people who are new to Drupal and want to find out what all the fuss is about.

They require registration ahead of time, and already 460+ people registered in the first 24 hours. (!) So if it sounds interesting to you and you can make it, head over to http://oreilly.com/go/drupal.

(PS: Yes, we're sure it's Friday, December 5, even though it says Wednesday a couple times on that page. :))

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Like any businesses, we receive numerous magazines from all sorts of places.  We have a little table full of magazines that don't get much attention.  (Frankly, most of them are too techy for me to read during my spare time...)  Yesterday, Kris was walking by this table and saw something that made him whip his head around and look twice.  "I swear I saw Druplicon..."  he murmured. 

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Look what's on the cover of the November 17, 2008 issue of Information Week! Drupal is mentioned several times throughout their series on open source.

In most every Drupal installation, there are a few (if not more) modules you inevitably end up installing and using.

Two of these are likely CCK and Views*. Then, all the other, shall we say, essential modules you end up hearing about, and installing as well.

So, your next question may be, “What’s the fastest way to get started with Drupal?”. If you know CVS then that may be a good way to go (it’s the method I use). If you don’t, then…

Why not get going quickly by trusting in some of the minds behind Drupal itself? Acquia Drupal is the “commercialized” version of Drupal. Although there is a free version too! It comes with a pre-installed collection of modules which all pretty much fall within the essential category. I just wonder why they didn’t include Global Redirect if they’re including Pathauto.

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CiviCRM 2.1.2 release with bug fixes, as well as a fix for a critical security vulnerability is now available for download. CiviCRM 2.0.7 a maintainance release fixing critical security vulnerabilities is also available for download. The vulnerability addressed could allow a remote user with insufficient permissions to access CiviCRM functionality via the API and / or command line scripts.

Upgrading your existing CiviCRM 2.0 and 2.1 sites is strongly recommended. Upgrade instructions are available on the wiki for Drupal, Joomla and Standalone

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Just as I completed my MsC last year at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), I've been asked to go give context and advice on the possibility of using Drupal with people at the Central European University in Budapest. They were looking at content management systems such as Plone and Drupal and were trying to scope their work and the possibilities they have for converting to an Open Source system. I gave them details on Drupal: some of the key components available, high profile sites using the system, support options they have, the rate of progress within the community, and they were impressed.

I almost forgot about this before they got back to me recently saying that they choose Drupal and would like to publicize their job offer for an in-house Drupal consultant, who could help migrate their data, bootstrap their work and educate other team members on Drupal. Now that Drupal 6 is shining brighter with CCK and Views out in full force, there is no question they are planning to use Drupal 6.

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Last but not least, we're going to look at:

• Spam Control
• XML Sitemap to help with search engine optimization
• Setup Metatagging
• Human Readable (and search engine readable) URLs
• Fivestar rating on content
• ServiceLinks to allow for social bookmarking

Spam Control

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Earlier today I took the one and half hour train ride up to Philly to attend the first DrupalCamp for that fine city. I hope they have more! Big thanks to the organizers, Nathan and Alex. It was very well put together and the venue was great. There were about 100 people there and I got to catch up with some friends and meet lots of new faces. I was slated to do two sessions, Contributing to Drupal and then a doc sprint. I got into town a little bit late and was not on top of my game, fighting off the remnants of my flu bug. Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed kicked off the session until I got in the door and set up (thanks Jeff!) and then we ended up doing one good long session on contributing. There were lots of good questions and conversation. My slides are pretty spare, to be used more as points to talk about, but I did have handy URLs to get more information on topics, so I've uploaded a PDF of them here. Everyone should feel free to use these in their own presentations and modify them up. Anything that spreads the good word of Drupal is alright by me. ;-)

UPDATE: sorry to folks that couldn't download the slides. It should all be working now.

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Doing a good wiki in Drupal 6 is surprisingly hard. My project to create a site with MediaWiki-like functionality for climate research at UC Berkeley took much longer than I thought it would, and the result was mediocre. Here are my notes evaluating different modules:

Modules I ended up using

• Talk (6.x-1.5)
  • Function: Move the comments into separate tab.
  • Configure: Enable in Content Type -> edit -> Workflow settings (which is odd, should be Comment settings).
• Diff (6.x-2.0)
  • Function: Show what changed between one revisions.

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