Drupal has won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award. As a result of the previous wins, Drupal graduated to the Hall of Fame along with Joomla.

It is a great honor for the Drupal community to be the first winner of the Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award. The Drupal community has worked hard to improve Drupal by adding internationalization, enhancing security, facilitating customization, increasing extensibility, and easing the user experience. This award is a great complement to winning the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. This critical recognition helps build both momentum and excitement towards releasing Drupal 7 in 2010.

This award has a $4000 prize, bringing the total prize money from the Packt Open Source CMS awards to $6000. The money will go to the Drupal association to help pay for drupal.org infrastructure, marketing, and Drupalcon events.

Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008.

From the award announcement,

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.

France 24 is a public 24/7 international news channel broadcast in three languages: French, English and Arabic. Its mission is to cover international current events from a French perspective and to convey French values throughout the world. The channel provides keys to understanding complex events through in-depth analysis. France 24 also puts culture at the forefront of its programming. France24 is part of the AEF (the "Audiovisuel Extérieur de la France" or French foreign media), along with RFI (a radio station) and TV5 (a TV station).

Launched in December, 2006, the website was originally based on a Java CMS, Magnolia. But due to stability problems, we switched to Drupal 5 in mid-2008. We have just migrated to Drupal 6 and a brand new codebase. This case study covers this migration, focusing on the technical part, and describes some of our homegrown modules to be open-sourced.

The monthy traffic of the France 24 websites is around 5 million unique visitors. A more geeky metric is that the site runs 300-400 concurrent active Apache threads at all times.

It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.

First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay. Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.

Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.

My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and Usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!

Lullabot is pleased to announce the second annual Do It With Drupal Seminar. This 3-day event is focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities.

The event is geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience. For new site-builders and decision-makers, DIWD will offer a great introduction to Drupal and the Drupal community. For more experienced Drupalers, DIWD will offer a great chance to pick up tips and tricks straight from the module developers themselves and a chance to connect and socialize with other Drupal professionals.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar will feature the following highlights:

• Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
• Discover new site-building strategies
• Learn from Drupal's top developers
• Hear from social media and social networking experts
• Connect with other Drupal professionals
• Expand your Drupal knowledge

This commercially produced event takes place at the Marriott Hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter, December 9, 10, 11, 2009 and features sessions by many "big names" from both inside and outside of the Drupal community (see list of current speaker list below).

The current list of speakers includes...