Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan member organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas. The Council was founded in 1921 by academics and diplomats who had advised President Woodrow Wilson on how to deal with the aftermath of World War I. Its 3,400 members include Presidents, Cabinet members, and other high-ranking U.S. government officials, as well as renowned academics, journalists, and major leaders of business, media, human rights, and other non-governmental groups.

Since its inception in 1922, articles and essays published in Foreign Affairs have helped shape political debate and policy on some of the most important issues of the day. Authors who have written for the journal have included influential intellectuals and political leaders ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton.

The new Foreign Affairs Web site, developed by Palantir.net, showcases Drupal’s wide variety of capabilities. In addition to leveraging existing modules, the site features a significant amount of new functionality developed specifically for this project. The magazine's management strongly supports the open source development model, and much of the work done for the site has been or will soon be contributed back to the Drupal community. 

The short video "What is Drupal?" won six Telly Awards, it was announced earlier this month. The video, produced by pingVision, is a fast-paced promo-style introduction to Drupal. The total running time is about a minute.

The video had its "premiere" of sorts at South by SouthWest this year, playing in the Acquia booth in the Trade Show area.

Last week Development Seed launched Open Atrium, an "intranet in a box" that acts as a foundation for developing custom team collaboration and knowledge management tools. Drupal's strength as a framework and its strong developer community are clearly the reasons we love Drupal, but in this post I specifically want to focus on how installation profiles and the Features module have allowed us to create a tight out of the box experience for Open Atrium.

Code freeze begins September 1st. During this period, we fix bugs and when Drupal 7 is stable, we release. In the past, we have done manual testing. This time we have an automated testing framework and already a large number of tests. In an ideal world, we would only release when all code is touched by tests. While this won't guarantee that Drupal will be bug free, every test contributes to the overall quality of Drupal.

Two weeks before the code freeze, we will gather in Los Angeles to write tests. This will take us into the darker corners of core, so we also get the chance to fix bugs and, because this precedes the code freeze, we have greater freedom in how to fix them.

Since this sprint is so close to the code freeze, it's an excellent time to raise the test coverage ratio as there will be little new development in the final two weeks.

Please join us! Go to the sprint sign-up page at http://groups.drupal.org/node/22652

Food, beverages, power, IP and chocolate will be provided by our sponsors, Causecast and the The Cherry Hill Company.

Online video provider Lynda.com just released my new six-hour video series, "Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data". You can check it out with a free one-day pass; it's also available to anyone with a Lynda.com subscription, which starts at $25/month.

The course covers calendars, mapping, charting, and preparing data for tabular export, all built on a foundation of CCK and Views. Since Lynda.com's audience is mostly graphic designers, the course also includes clarification about how to plan data structures. Extra bonus: For giggles, check out the Introduction video, which includes some live-action video of the author looking goofy. :)

One wag in IRC questioned the need for such a course. "Presentation of Data?," he said. "Isn't that what Drupal does anyway?" He's right -- in the same way that a car is a tool for going shopping.

JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.

Going multilingual

When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.

At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.

The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.

We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.