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.

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.

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!

CCK Links

• 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.

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.

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).