At the Drupal Association retreat in San Francisco, the general assembly set the completion of the drupal.org redesign as its number one priority for 2010. The assembly agreed to fund five contracts to help eliminate obstacles that had prevented the community from completing the redesign.

Five key roles were identified: Architect, Solr developer, Project module developer, and an infrastructure developer. The association also elected to upgrade Drupal.org code repository from CVS to Git to help maintain Drupal.org as the hub of Drupal development.

Hiring process:

Job descriptions were developed in conjunction with both the redesign volunteers and the Drupal.org project managers, Kieran Lal, Chris Strahl, and Lisa Rex. The job descriptions were then posted to groups.drupal.org for 3 weeks. Approximately 35 applications were received and a dozen interviews were conducted by the project management team. The contracts were negotiated with Drupal Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, to whom the project team reports directly. Contractors work day-to-day with the project management team. The association will pay for the contract work using the funds raised through memberships, advertising, partnerships, affiliates, and DrupalCon sponsorships.

Drupal.org will have some scheduled downtime, Wednesday 21st of July, 22:00 UTC (3PM PDT, 6PM EDT). We will be enhancing the usability of the drupal.org issue queues. Since the drupal.org database is quite large, this can take a while. We hope to be back in one hour.

The Drupal Association has been working to figure out the most effective ways it can help local user groups organize Drupal camps. We quickly realized that there was a lack of data about how past and present Drupal camps were currently being organized. With that in mind, we created an online survey for DrupalCamp organizers that would help everyone understand how Drupal camps currently worked.

Over the course of about 7 weeks, we collected a total of 51 responses, with 6 duplicates and unusable, making our sample size 45 Drupal camps. In a previous article posted on the Drupal Event Organization Drupal group, I posted the results from the first 31 responses. Since that article was published (and because of it), we had an additional 14 responses, making the data that much more valuable.

Overall, the 45 camps that completed the survey had over 6,200 participants, a combined budget of almost $250,000, and were organized by over 400 volunteers.

The resulting data is extremely valuable to both the Drupal Association and Drupal user groups around the world. The Drupal Association now has an idea of how camps are currently being organized and can make informed decisions about how to help future organizers. Local user groups can use this data to help plan future events. In particular, the average cost-per-particpant and participants-per-volunteers data (highlighted below) should be considered when planning future camps.

Our fifth Drupal 7 alpha version was released a little over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the sixth (and hopefully final) alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes many critical bug fixes, a nearly working upgrade path, and a new default core theme: Bartik!

Please see the release notes for more details.

When will alpha become beta?

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. On or about August 1, 2010 (or when the upgrade path is working, whichever comes first) we will create a new official Drupal 7 release. If this list is fixed, it will be a beta release. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta within the next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

We are proud to announce the keynote speakers at DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010: Rasmus Lerdorf (topic to be crowdsourced), Jeremy Keith (Design of HTML5) and Dries Buytaert (State of Drupal).

The State of Drupal

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead
Tuesday, August 24th

Dries Buytaert will discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss the final preparations for the release of Drupal 7, the Drupal.org redesign, and the plans for Drupal 8.

Dries Buytaert is passionate about the web, open source, and photography. He is the original creator and project lead of Drupal, an open source social publishing system. He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also working on Mollom, a service that helps you identify content quality and that stops website spam.

Topic to be decided by you

Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Project Founder
Wednesday, August 25th

Tell Rasmus which topic you would like him to focus on by leaving a comment on the DrupalCon Copenhagen site.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for creating the PHP project in 1995 and he has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. Rasmus was most recently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! for over 7 years before joining WePay in 2010. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow @rasmus on Twitter.

The Design of HTML5

Jeremy Keith, Author of HTML5 For Web Designers
Thursday, August 26th

Everyone's talking about the benefits of HTML5 for Web applications but the specification also introduces an extra layer of semantic richness to our Web documents. These additions aren't wishful thinking for some far-flung future: you can start using them today. That's because the design principles driving HTML5 are steeped in pragmatism. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it's a website, a content management system, or the very language that underpins the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the Web consultancy firm Clearleft. He wrote the books DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, and most recently, HTML5 For Web Designers. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane.