There's lots of exciting news about Groups.Drupal.org which was launched over three years ago as a

a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups.

Three years since and there are almost 650 groups on the site and over 51,000 subscriptions to those groups with over 700,000 page views each month. A glorious hub indeed.

Along with the redesign and upgrade happening for drupal.org, Groups.Drupal.org is being upgraded. Moshe Weitzman is leading the charge on this effort. Moshe has decided that this upgrade makes a good point to pass along some maintenance responsibilities for the site to Josh Koenig and Greg Knaddison.

Web designers have taken to blogging platforms as a foundation for their portfolio websites. It has always bothered me since, as a web designer, I believe in user-centered design. Blogging systems are not ideal for showcasing a portfolio, as it’s coming at the project from the perspective of “what’s easy to build and how can we fit what we want into it?”

I think a lot of designers feel overwhelmed by Drupal, because of all the capability and power it has. But Drupal is capable of not just managing newspapers and portals – Drupal can easily and efficiently handle small-time operations, as well.

I knew I needed to redesign my own website, www.headlinercreative.com, and I was determined to use Drupal. I approached the project like any client’s website, starting from the very beginning: figuring out the goals and purpose of the website, figuring out what content I wanted to display and the best way to display it. I wanted something that would be easy for me to use and update, and that would be intuitive for visitors to view my work and participate in blog discussions. I knew that whatever I came up with, Drupal would handle it superbly.

As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic.com, the first venture backed start-up to use Drupal, was acquired by the Clarity Digital Group which owns and operates Examiner.com a quantified top 100 web property for local news and information. Over the next ~6 months we'll be migrating Examiner.com to the NowPublic Drupal based platform, creating one of the largest public Drupal installs on the planet!

While we at NowPublic have been blessed with a loyal, dedicated, and amazing team that continues to impress me on a daily basis, and fortunate enough to have great advisers, the unsung hero of this story that I want to publicly thank is everyone who has contributed to Drupal, and the Drupal community - without you all this would not have been possible. Drupal the software, and the Drupal community have been critical to the success of NowPublic.com from the very beginning.

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce the release of a new Drupal book called Drupal 6 Site Blueprints authored by Timi Ogunjobi. This is a project-oriented book that provides readers with a starting foundation for 12 powerful Drupal Web site projects that can be tailored to their needs, including community functionality, blog networks, e-commerce stores, photo sharing, Google mashups, and so on..

Packt Publishing is also pleased to offer a 15% discount to any Drupal.org user. To purchase this book with this discount, simply purchase Drupal 6 Site Blueprints through Packt Publishing, and provide the code Dru6SBto. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

This book is aimed at Drupal users in the following categories:

• Students seeking hands-on experience building useful PHP-based Web projects using a rapid development environment.
• Hobbyists looking to build rich Web applications for personal and business use or for their clubs or society.
• Business owners who would like to test the Drupal platform and to see if it meets their immediate and future business needs for a Web application.
• Professionals who like to quickly present prototypes of new Web projects to their clients.

After some 82 weeks of development beginning in February 2008, no one should be caught by surprise that we are in a code freeze for a release of Drupal 7, the next and best release of Drupal yet. However, as we all know, some of the best patches always happen at the last minute, and there are always last-minute patches that must happen. As part of my State of Drupal presentation at DrupalCon Paris last week, I talked about the Drupal 7 code freeze. Since not all of us could be in Paris, I wanted to share the relevant slides (PDF, 85 KB) in this post.

The Drupal Association has taken the first steps in implementing its new events plan. In this first phase, we will be working to schedule DrupalCons two years in advance, and we have established regional groups to manage this process. We have committed to adding a third annual DrupalCon that will float between regions not currently served by the European and North American Cons.

The Regional Organizing Groups are open to any interested party in the community, and free to choose their own structure and governance. They will select cities, choose local teams, and create programs for future DrupalCons. Australian, European, North American and South American Groups are forming or have formed and can be found on http://groups.drupal.org.

We are making these changes because DrupalCons are growing just as the Drupal community is growing and we expect that growth to continue and accelerate. We have committed to making DrupalCon available to anyone who wants to attend them, and this means that we need to select appropriate venues and work hard to be efficient in order to keep the ticket price affordable. The Drupal Events Plan is a work in progress and is available online for your review.

We are committed to having DrupalCons that serve the entire community while maintaining the sense of community that has been the hallmark of DrupalCon. You can become involved by joining the Drupal Association, taking part in a regional group and in your local Drupal group.