Drupal 6.8 and Drupal 5.14 are slight updates to Drupal 6.7 and 5.13, removing an incompatibility with versions of PHP before 5.2 released in the earlier versions. The 6.7 and 5.13 releases fixed problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities.

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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Drupal 6.7 and Drupal 5.13, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

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.

Using PHP 5.1.x or earlier? We found a bug which causes a warning on login. That patch has been rolled back in CVS, and we will be doing a bugfix release on December 11th. As always, please test this release, so we can find and fix any other critical bugs, see the Bug reports section below.

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The deadline for submitting sessions proposals for DrupalCon DC is December 10. If you'd like to present but haven't yet submitted, please submit your session before midnight! So far, almost 150 session ideas have been submitted and discuss a variety of topics. It's exciting to have such a large and varied pool to select the final sessions from - and to know that we're well on our way to having a high quality conference.

In the weeks after the deadline, we'll work with a volunteer committee (please contact us if you want to help) to go through the proposals - and in conjunction with the votes each has received - select the best sessions for each track, merge ones that overlap, and ensure that each track has good depth and representation.

The final schedule will be posted to the DrupalCon website in January. If you have a last minute session idea, we have plenty of space for BoF sessions which will be scheduled on the fly.

The Drupal Association is excited to announce that the last iteration, iteration 11, of the Drupal.org redesign is now available for review. Hundreds of Drupal community members and designers have participated in the redesign of Drupal.org.

We have had over 450 comments on 10 posts in the Drupal.org redesign group. Leisa Reichelt, our user experience research lead, has posted over 26 blog entries about the Drupal.org redesign with over 300 comments! Over on Mark Boulton Design, Mark has blogged 6 posts with over 430 comments. Who knew that open source contributors were so passionate about fonts, logos, and brands? Mark Boulton has also blogged three posts on his personal blog. It's been an exciting, educational, and insightful process for everyone who has been involved. If you haven't had a chance to review these 42 blog posts, or the numerous posts about the redesign on Planet Drupal, please take a few hours and get involved now!

We are now recruiting theme developers from the community to help create both the base theme and Drupal.org site specific themes. The base theme will implement the design style guide developed as part of the redesign deliverables. The Drupal.org specific themes will remain exclusive to Drupal.org web sites: http://association.drupal.org, http://api.drupal.org, http://security.drupal.org, http://infrastructure.drupal.org.

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Crooks and Liars is an American liberal blog, which was founded in August of 2004, during the 2004 Presidential election, by John Amato. It was the first video style blog around, starting in a pre-YouTube era. Crooks and Liars has a team of about a dozen volunteers, including administrators, contributors and moderators.   Crooks and Liars has grown immensely since its birth, now averaging  over 230,000 unique visitors per day and over 330,000 page impressions.

Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.

As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.

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Good news! During the week of December 15, we're organizing a 5-day Fields in Drupal core code sprint at Acquia! The goal is to get CCK functionality into Drupal 7.

So far, Karen, Yves and Barry have signed up -- Karen and Yves are the main CCK maintainers, and Barry has done a lot of work on CCK as well.

To help us fund the sprint, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. We need money for airline tickets, hotel rooms, food and transportation. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive core and CCK experience.

I've tentatively worked out a budget of $7,000 USD, which covers flight, food and hotel costs for at least four people (Karen, Yves, and two additional people). Since Acquia is covering my travel expenses and allowing Barry to participate all week long, that gives us six people working on CCK-fields-in-core for an entire week. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or donated to the Drupal Association.

To guarantee that Yves and Karen can attend, Acquia is funding Yves' and Karen's hotel and airplane tickets if enough money can't be raised through donations. Acquia is also providing working space in our Andover office.

We'll try to allow people to participate in the sprint remotely, and provide a daily update on our progress. If you're interested and available to participate, join the Fields in Core group, enable e-mail notifications, and block time in your calendar between December 15 and December 19. We'll use the Fields in Core group to plan and to let you know how you can contribute and participate.

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Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal outside of education as well.

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One mom's mission to create a safe online space for teens

Yoursphere.com is a safe kids-only social network (built with Drupal 5), which is complemented by an online safety blog and discussion site, internet-safety.yoursphere.com (built with Acquia Drupal).

Founder Mary Kay Hoal is a savvy mother of five. When her children started spending time on social network sites such as MySpace she did a little research and was shocked to find that social networks were magnets for sexual predators and rampant with inappropriate content targeting youth. "We wouldn't open our front door and invite 29,000 registered sex offenders into the house," Mary Kay told her kids, "so why should we accept that online?"

So she banned social networking from her home and saw her approval rating dip below that of steamed broccoli. Besides being unpopular at home, Mary Kay also knew that trying to banish MySpace would be a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. She really had no choice -- it was her duty as a mom to create a safe alternative.

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While many people say that theming is one of the better organized topics in Drupal's documentation, many have expressed frustration that relevant pages are located in a variety of different branches, and even separate handbooks. The documentation team has also decided that this has created an unsustainable path for forward maintenance. Therefore, as a first step, we are going to merge nearly all theming-related information into a single Consolidated Theming Guide on Sunday, 23 November, to be located at http://drupal.org/theme-guide (currently pointing to the Drupal 6 Theme Guide). Existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible.

A theming documentation workgroup is now forming to focus on reorganizing the new book's navigation hierarchy. For further information on the project and how to join in, please visit the group's project page.

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Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.

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Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.

Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.

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CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to provide stronger code and APIs. We've tried to respond to many of the things that were often requested but were difficult or impossible to do in the Drupal 5 version: streamline the process of creating fields, use drag-n-drop to reorganize fields and values, provide a user-friendly 'Add more' button for multiple values, give developers an API and more tools to customize CCK behavior, and provide more documentation.

Many of the things you see in the latest code would not have been possible without all the new Drupal 6 and Views 2 features. Drupal 6, CCK 2 and Views 2 make a great combination!

• Project page
• CCK 6.x-2.0 release notes (people upgrading from previous RCs should read this).
• Download CCK 6.x-2.0 - Fresh from the maintainers: 6.x-2.1 bugfix release

Important: This release fixes a (minor) security issue that was present in the previous RC releases.
See the Security Annoucement for more informations.

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Drupal.org will undergo a scheduled maintenance period Saturday, Nov. 8th, 02:00 GMT. Barring problems, the maintenance should take about 15-30 minutes.

NOTE: Maintenance is complete, and took about 25 minutes. Everything was accomplished without issue.

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A year after answering Dries Buytaert's call for Drupal book authors, Aaron Winborn is pleased to announce the publication of Drupal Multimedia, which is now available! Packt Publishing, known for their support of Open Source projects, will donate a portion of the book's royalties to the Drupal Association.

The book teaches the best practices and contributed modules for integrating Images, Video, and Audio into your site. Written for Drupal 6, the book assumes you are a developer, themer, or administrator who needs to embed multimedia. It makes heavy use of Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2, and offers demonstrations of the various modules required for the task.

The book helps to answer common questions, such as when to use Image or ImageField, how to leverage the power of FileField, and how to override theme functions to display multimedia content the way we need it.

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The Drupal Association today announced that Drupal has won two prestigious Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards this week - the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS. This marks the second consecutive year that Drupal has won Packt Publishing’s Overall Open Source CMS award. In addition, on Monday, Packt Publishing recognized leading Drupal contributor Earl Miles as a 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued Person (MVP).

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For the third year in a row, Drupal has been nominated for a Packt Publishing Open Source CMS award. Packt Publishing is announcing winners all week. Today they announced the 2008 best PHP open source CMS.

The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.

Drupal won this award in both the popular vote and the judges selection. The judges cited improvements to installation, updates, breadth of features in modules, and how Drupal handles errors in these processes. Of special note was Drupal's use of social features and how those features integrate with web content management. Of course the final advantage Drupal had was the "large and hugely supportive community". This award belongs to everyone in the Drupal community for helping each other and particularly new users.

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This morning Earl Miles, also known as merlinofchaos, was named one of the 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People. Earl won specifically for his contributions to the Drupal project.

What is particularly exciting about this award is that Earl is the third Drupal community member to win an award for their contributions to the Drupal project this year. Bryan Ruby said it best.

What I found interesting is that most of the MVPs for projects were the projects' lead/founder. Perhaps that says something about Drupal truly being community driven.

Please congratulate Earl on a well deserved award for his contributions and leadership to the Drupal project. You can read Earl's response on his blog Angry Donuts.

Drupal 6.6 and Drupal 5.12, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

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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Registration for DrupalCon DC is now open and the DrupalCon DC website live. In the two hours after the first announcement went out via Twitter, 200 people registered to come to DrupalCon! Discount tickets are still available at $175 a ticket - about 200 are left now so move quickly to make sure you get the lowest rate available. Also, there are already 18 sessions submitted and voting has begun - create a profile to vote on sessions and submit your own.

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Three and a half months ago, Views, along with CCK and OG were made available as a release candidates. Today, I've finally come to the conclusion that the remaining bugs are minor enough to go ahead with an official, formal release of Views 2, and we can finally say that this module is now out and available. Yes, it actually beat Panels 2 to final release!

If you've never tried Views 2, or are hesitating about Drupal 6, this new release of Views is a very good reason to consider making the transition, especially in your new sites.

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views 2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

Possibly the most important change is that Views can now create lists of anything: nodes, users, taxonomy -- you name it! Another large change you'll notice right off the bat is that the UI for Views has completely changed, and is full of JavaScripty goodness. While it may take some getting used to initially, we're confident that you'll find that the changes ultimately make creating views much easier than before.

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