The Horizon Interactive Awards winners were announced over the past weekend. Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Several Drupal-powered sites, developed by studio:module and pingVision were among the winners.

Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.

Many of the projects this year build on work done during previous Summer of Codes. Drupal core will benefit from a new aggregator, improved search scoring, OpenID attribute exchange, revamped help system and color module, SimpleTest security scanner and generalized Validation API. There are also projects focused on improvements to the Drupal.org infrastructure, including ApacheSolr search, version control API, and the much demanded plugin manager for secure, automated updating of module and themes.

Some of Drupal's major contributed modules will also gain, including Views as widgets, Views RDF/XML/JSON output, Views & CCK chart support, extensions to Nodequeue and OAuth support for Services.

There's also a healthy component of brand new functionality, including an image manipulation GUI, memetracker, bookings API, Icon module, document import module and Usability testing suite.

If you'd like to keep up on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2008 working group and help out in whatever ways you can. Also check out Planet SoC to read blog entries from Summer of Code students across all mentoring organizations.

Here's to another great summer! :) Read on to find more details about Drupal's accepted proposals.

The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.
--Dries Buytaert, in Businessweek

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Also among the top innovators are Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, Joe Green of Causes, Drew Houston of Dropbox, David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, and others.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

Szeged city view from the Tisza river

At this year's Drupalcon we're turning Szeged, Hungary into Drupaltown!

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Szeged, Hungary from August 27 to 30, 2008 in the Library and Conference Center of the Szeged University. With a thousand Drupal enthusiasts expected we'll be turning this picturesque student city into a true Drupaltown!

Drupalcon has been a major success for the Drupal community, with every conference reaching out to more and more people. Like Boston, Drupalcon Szeged will again provide ample opportunities both for business people, developers, themers, designers, and users in the community: there will be a code sprint, plenty of space for BOF sessions, a job fair and, of course, plenty of opportunity for networking. Start planning, buy your tickets early and be prepared to meet your Drupal community in Szeged, Hungary; Drupaltown!