Drupal News

DrupalCon Denver is just 5 months away. While the organizing team is committed to keeping the event affordable - with a low ticket price of $350 and affordable hotel options - there are even lower cost options for some members of the Drupal community.

DrupalCon Denver Scholarships

The deadline to apply for scholarships for DrupalCon in Denver is tomorrow -- anyone who has not yet applied can do so online until November 18, 2011 midnight Mountain Time. The DrupalCon Denver scholarship program allows community members who would otherwise not be able to attend DrupalCon to benefit from the DrupalCon experience as the Drupal Community benefits from each scholar's attendance. Read about the eligibility requirements and get the link to the online form by visiting DrupalCon Denver's Scholarship webpage.

The Drupal Security Team was originally created in 2005. Though we handled security issues before that, we didn't have a team with proper infrastructure until then. At that time, Károly Négyesi (chx) was the team leader. In July 2006 chx changed his role in the team and I promoted Heine Deelstra to be the security team lead. Heine recently stepped down as the security team lead, and I'm pleased to announce that Greg Knaddison (or greggles on drupal.org) will be filling this role.

Greg has been a consistent member of the security team and both Heine Deelstra, the security team members, and myself unanimously agreed that Greg is the logical person to head the Drupal Security Team.

git.drupal.org, drupal.org and our sub-sites have a scheduled maintenance window on Tuesday November 15th from 5PM PST to 7PM PST (UTC-8). Note that this is not a downtime window for drupal.org, but a period of possible instability. git.drupal.org and git.drupalcode.org will have an actual downtime during this window. Watch drupal_infra on Twitter for real-time status updates.

This maintenance window is to re-rack and re-VLAN our servers. Thank you for your patience.

Klaus Purer is a member of the Drupal community who has been recently been extremely active with project applications. How active? In the last 30 days he has commented on almost twice as many projects as the next most prolific commenter. Even though he just got involved in the last month, he's tied for most reviews of the most projects in the last 6 months!

Earlier this year the Drupal Association began a process to elect and build a new board. In July a call for nominations was made and the community responded with over 50 submissions. The nomination committee spent many weeks reviewing the nominations, following up with potential candidates, until finally submitting a slate of nominees, which was confirmed by the board. I'm happy to announce the new Board of Directors:

1. Jeff Walpole (until 2014)
2. Vesa Palmu (until 2014)
3. Tiffany Farriss (until 2014)
4. Cary Gordon (until 2013)
5. Danese Cooper (until 2013)
6. Mike Woster (until 2013)
7. Angela Byron (until 2012)
8. Mitchell Toomy (2012)
9. Unknown - one open seat, to be filled

The Board also approved Dries Buytaert (me) to fill the "founder role" in this year's Board of Directors.

The Board's term will begin on November 1, 2011. The first meeting of the new Board of Directors will be on November 16, 2011. This will be followed by the Drupal Association Board Retreat in Chicago, December 9 - 11, 2011.

Drupal 7.9, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Several critical bugs with the OpenID have been addressed in this release, among other critical and major bugs, and a few new API features. See the Drupal 7.9 release notes for a full listing.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.