Our second Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the third 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!

The release notes contain a list of the biggest changes. The most notable change for developers is Drupal 7 now ships with jQuery 1.4 and jQuery UI 1.8. We've also fixed a number of critical issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused passwords to be stored in plain-text under certain conditions. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

This alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

Brazen Careerist is a premier Generation Y career-based social network. Our goal is to help shift job seeker's and the recruiter's approaches to focus on social strengths and ideas instead of just experience. We have been using Drupal for almost two years to help us scale and add social features rapidly. Using it as a platform has been crucial to our success and will continue to be in the foreseeable future.

Most recently, we gave our users new and powerful ways to participate in idea-based conversations. We also rolled out innovative integrations with external social-networking sites and revolutionary ways to display your online resume. We'd like to showcase some of these new features to the Drupal community, and hopefully get some more great ideas from you guys!

The Drupal.org redesign continues to progress. This is great news and a morale boost for everyone involved.

Since our front page post on February 3...

• Over 20 enthusiastic new volunteers have come forward to lend their expertise.
• Several experienced professional Drupal project managers have been added to the project management team
• We have produced two new theming documentation. This will help the theme implementation teams standardize their implementations. See details further on.
• Contributors can sign into the new *.staging.drupal.org subsites (groups, association, api, localize, etc.) in additional to the main site now.
• We continue to need expert resources with knowledge of drupal.org data sources to assist with custom Solr development
• Trellon has checked in an alpha dashboard and we now have a beta version of the main Download and Extend page.

Once the major blockers are cleared, we will push forward with engaging the MVP implementation volunteers that signed up last year.

Our next sprint will be on Friday, March 19th from 8am PST/4pm GMT to 12pm PST, 8PM GMT. We aim to focus on theming, and completing the search generated blocks. The sprint will be held on IRC in #drupal-infrastructure.

Drupal 6 Attachment Views, by me, J. Ayen Green, is my second title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at Drupal web site developers who want to build more functionality and interaction into their views, but aren’t ready quite yet to take on panels. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

I wrote this to be a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide. It uses actual case study that was developed in parallel with the book’s writing. This guide presents purposeful and interactive examples that build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples help you to learn quickly to use this exciting feature of views.

Over 400 session submissions have been submitted for DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held April 19-21, 2010. We need your help in deciding which of those sessions will be included in the conference program. Please come review the list of sessions and vote on the ones you'd like to see most.

Voting ends Monday, March 1st at 23:59 PST.

DrupalCon is a community-driven event. You've shared with us a vast array of exciting new ideas, proven recipes for success, case studies, best practices, new solutions to old problems, and other gems of knowledge. Now help us narrow down the selection. Your opinions are what shapes what happens at DrupalCon. Remember, every vote counts!

If you're a business, organization, or individual interested in helping to sponsor DrupalCon San Francisco, opportunities are still available. Contact us via the Web site, via e-mail at fundraising@drupal.com or phone at 415-894-9320 today!