Updates

A few updates since the original post was made:

• master/slave has now been implemented, and the site is more responsive.
• A newer tracker patch is now in effect, and should be functionally the same as plain vanilla Drupal 5.x, but with less database load.

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The Drupal association, infrastructure team, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) team made several changes to the Drupal.org infrastructure. Some of these changes affect how you use some drupal.org features, so please read below for more information.

Over the last few months, Drupal's web site (drupal.org) has seen explosive growth in the number of users, posts and comments, as the project gets more and more popular. This has put stress on the hosting infrastructure for drupal.org, which is community donated and generously hosted by the OSUOSL.

Drupal 4.7.7 and 5.2 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as some security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Download Drupal 5.2.
• Download Drupal 4.7.7.

Today, as part of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Drupal was awarded a $5000 USD bounty as part of the bounty program announced last year. I'm proud to say we were one of the first three projects awarded along with Plone and dotnetnuke.

Our last status update noted that July 1st was the code freeze deadline for new features to get into Drupal 6. While some of the strategic improvements that were close to being ready at that time got committed, we are now focusing on bug fixes, performance improvements, documentation updates and usability improvements.

We would like to encourage all users and developers to download a development tarball and test the old and the new functionality. There are certainly bugs in the code still, and we would like to squash them. Existing bug reports in the issue queue need some review. The patch spotlight page helps you understand how patch reviews work, and how can you help, if you are new to this kind of involvement. On the other hand, if you found a new bug, don't hesitate to open an issue and submit a fix. We are working towards releasing the first beta of Drupal 6.0 in a few weeks, which depends on how well the bug fixes go, so get involved if you'd like to see Drupal 6 released sooner.

Warner Brothers Records just launched their new web site which is now running on Drupal. The site is part of a Drupal multisite setup, designed with help from Bryght to meet the needs of WBR and providing the ability for each of their artists’ sites to share the same Drupal codebase (Drupal v5 of course). All code revisions are managed with SVN on a SAMP (Solaris/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack with APC for caching (go open source!) The video files are delivered using the Akamai CDN network. There are some fun, unique features so be sure to check out the draggable node panel and the nice jquery/interface/ajax(ahah) artist slider! This writeup explains some of the information and details on the setup, modules, content types, and custom parts.

The site was designed by Prod and the site setup, customizing and theme done by Chris and Sarva Bryant from Gravitek Labs. Warner Bros. Records provides their own hosting and infrastructure, maintained by in-house tech geeks Ethan Kaplan and Shaun Haber.

The past year, a lot of Drupal Local User Groups were born. I'd like to use this thread to reflect on that, and to collect some ideas and factoids about the Drupal Local User Group that you're part of. Are there best practices that you can share with other local user groups? What works? What doesn't work? Any trends? What was noteworthy in the history of your group? Anything the Drupal project, or the Drupal Association could do to help you organize local Drupal events?