News and announcements

Following the success of its predecessor, Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, Packt Publishing announces Drupal 7, an updated and revised version of the original book by David Mercer written specifically for Drupal 7. The book is written for Drupal 7 beginners or newcomers to Drupal in general and will help help anyone to create and operate any type of website quickly and efficiently.

This book provides a great way to learn and master Drupal 7, enabling you to create virtually any type of website. It meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to design and build sites like a pro. By clearly and concisely demonstrating the fundamentals of Drupal in combination with practical and methodical coverage of more advanced subjects, this book paves the way for anyone to quickly become proficient at building and operating professional websites.

150 quiz questions and exercises will help you to consolidate and expand on what you learn in the book.

Drupal.org readers are also entitled to a 20% promotional discount when ordering through Packt. Make sure you provide the discount code (Drupal7book20) upon purchase to receive the discount.

Remember that, as with all Packt books, a percentage of the revenue from each book sold will go to support the open source technology on which the book is based - in this case, the proceeds will benefit the Drupal Association.

Update: Drupal 7.0 Beta 1 is available now!

Our last Drupal 7 alpha version was released about two months ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the seventh (and hopefully final) alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes:

• HUGE number of upgrade path fixes, including automated tests for updates. We are *very* close to a totally working upgrade path! Please test!
• Great usability improvements, including the installer not greeting you with a red error of death anymore on shared hosts!
• Field UI improvements to allow it to be further extended from contrib.
• Numerous Form API fixes and improvements.
• Numerous accessibility fixes.
• A variety of PostgreSQL and SQLite fixes, almost at 100% automated tests passing on both!
• Lots of polish on coding standards compliance and API documentation.
• Markup improvements, and a new default jQuery UI theme.
• Numerous security fixes, including 'forward-ports' of Drupal core SAs, and fixes to private files.
• Performance improvements.
• There have been several API changes since alpha6 to fix critical issues. These are broadcast to the development mailing list by Randy Fay.

When will alpha become beta?

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta within the next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!