An often raised question on drupal.org is, "when will release x.y be done?". And most often the first answer received will be "It is done when it is done." Or it is just as likely the answer will be phrased in a somewhat less friendly manner: "When is the last time you patched a bug or tested a patch?". While one of these is a question, both qualify as good answers to the question "when willl it be done?". This is because software development in the Open Source differs in some important points to traditional software development. In this posting you can read what the difference is and how you can make, be, that difference.

Uwe Hermann has written a comprehensive article in the current issue of PHP Solutions, German edition Ausgabe 1 2006 (13). Uwe walks his readers through installing Drupal, and considers topics like multisite setups from the very beginning. He pays careful attention to describing how one would create a portal site (music portal in his article), where the site would be accessed using different subdomains, such as rock.example.com, blues.example.com and classical.example.com. This includes using database prefixing, and Uwe provides assistance on using the database prefixing scripts which ship with Drupal.

There is a Drupal Meet-up at the new CivicSpace Labs offices in San Francisco this Thursday. The meeting is being convened to support communication amongst developers and the small businesses being built on the Drupal platform. We are open to your ideas about what to cover. Please contribute thoughts to the agenda.

Folks, I'll be sending out information for people to begin signing up for the Drupal-specific sessions at the OSCMS, Vancouver Conference soon--January 5th to be exact. For more information on existing sessions, and for contact information to suggest a new session, please visit the conference page. If you would like to add a session, please submit both the session topic and a short description of the session, preferrably no later than January 6th. It would be tremendously helpful to find a session moderator as well... :)

After half a decade of being the lead of the best code any Content Management Framework has, Dries' personal site has been Drupalised at last.

GUADEC is the main event of the GNOME community, celebrated once a year. We have recently adopted Drupal as the platform of the GUADEC's website (http://beta.guadec.org) and we have decided to launch a contest to choose a GUADEC logo and Drupal theme: Artists Wanted.