Over the last few years the Drupal project has been evolving its relationship with hosting companies and the hosting industry.

As part of our ongoing outreach efforts, the Drupal community is having a Drupal booth at Hostingcon, in Washington DC, on August 10-12th. Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh Hosting, is staffing the Drupal booth and doing a presentation about Drupal on the expo floor to the Hostingcon attendees. If you are in the DC area, the conference is running for 2 more days.

The Drupal community is alive with meetups, user groups, and camps. However, there isn't a published formula on using Drupal to accomplish the needs of a large meetup, camp, or convention. This By Them worked with LA Drupal organizers to design and develop what we hope will be a useful camp formula for others, available for download under the GPL.

DrupalCampLA.com was built on Drupal 6 using core & contributed modules to handle event registration, sponsorship management, featured speakers, user bio's, and session proposals. The website features an attendee driven event schedule where members propose sessions and only registered members pick which sessions they'd like to see (in the BarCamp style). Planning the schedule for the day of events has been made flexible enough to allow organizers to maintain a master schedule with ease. Not to mention that all attendees get their own schedule view with the sessions they pick.

In heavy testing of the proposed update of the automated testing infrastructure, we decided it was not yet ready to deploy. However, the other code we wanted to upgrade was successfully installed and the database updates ran without error. Therefore, the downtime really went from 12:47am until 1:09am UTC on Friday 2009-08-14. We're sorry it started late, but the extra testing allowed us to avoid trouble that would have led to an even longer window with the site off-line.

Unfortunately, most of the new code isn't very end-user visible, so there's not much to point at on the upgraded site to show off. But, it's going to let us roll out more changes and new features in the future (without needing to take the site offline).

Thanks again for your patience and understanding, and please accept our apologies for the late start.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, located in Milton, Delaware, is one of the 25 largest microbrewers in North America. Starting in 1995, Dogfish Head went from a backroom operation of three little kegs with propane burners underneath to a full-fledged brewery and bottling powerhouse. They ship and sell beer in over 30 states, are currently expanding their brewery, branching out with restaurant franchises, and continue to grow.

The Dogfish Head brand prides itself on a ‘do it yourself’, ‘off-centered’, grassroots style work ethic. When it came time for them to choose a company to build their website, they chose another ‘off-centered’ company, Inclind Inc, not too far from the brewery.

Drupal 6 Content Administration, by J. Ayen Green, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal users, who are either not developers or are new to Drupal. This book is designed for those who run the site day-to-day but didn't set it up, and aren't necessarily that well versed in Drupal or web technologies, and as a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Foundation!

This is a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide that uses an actual case study. In an interactive and informal manner, this guide presents purposeful examples that continue to build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples mean you can learn quickly how to take care of the content in your Drupal site.

The Lullabot team is proud to announce its latest Drupal learning tool: Lullabot Online Workshops. The first of these is "Drupal Fundamentals", a six-week course beginning September 9th, 2009. Each week's live 2-hour streaming video-and-multimedia class will focus one one aspect in the process of building and configuring an entire Drupal site.

Students will be able to watch as the site is built and instructors delve deep into specific topics such as taxonomy, comments, building content types with CCK, and creating both simple and complex content listings with Views. Each weekly discussion will conclude with a question-and-answer period with the Lullabot instructors and a homework assignment to reinforce the lesson.

Each student will get his/her own sandbox Drupal site in which they can set up and experiment with Drupal. Each lesson will be recorded and placed in a student-accessible video archive, so whether one is unable to make it to a live session or simply needs to review, the class will be available to them in the archive. Additionally, students will be able to post to class message board where they can discuss lessons with the instructor and other students.