News and announcements

Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 7 is available now!

Our fifth Drupal 7 alpha version was released a little over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the sixth (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 many critical bug fixes, a nearly working upgrade path, and a new default core theme: Bartik!

Please see the release notes for more details.

When will alpha become beta?

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. On or about August 1, 2010 (or when the upgrade path is working, whichever comes first) we will create a new official Drupal 7 release. If this list is fixed, it will be a beta release. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. 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!

We are proud to announce the keynote speakers at DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010: Rasmus Lerdorf (topic to be crowdsourced), Jeremy Keith (Design of HTML5) and Dries Buytaert (State of Drupal).

The State of Drupal

Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead
Tuesday, August 24th

Dries Buytaert will discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss the final preparations for the release of Drupal 7, the Drupal.org redesign, and the plans for Drupal 8.

Dries Buytaert is passionate about the web, open source, and photography. He is the original creator and project lead of Drupal, an open source social publishing system. He is co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also working on Mollom, a service that helps you identify content quality and that stops website spam.

Topic to be decided by you

Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Project Founder
Wednesday, August 25th

Tell Rasmus which topic you would like him to focus on by leaving a comment on the DrupalCon Copenhagen site.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for creating the PHP project in 1995 and he has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. Rasmus was most recently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! for over 7 years before joining WePay in 2010. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow @rasmus on Twitter.

The Design of HTML5

Jeremy Keith, Author of HTML5 For Web Designers
Thursday, August 26th

Everyone's talking about the benefits of HTML5 for Web applications but the specification also introduces an extra layer of semantic richness to our Web documents. These additions aren't wishful thinking for some far-flung future: you can start using them today. That's because the design principles driving HTML5 are steeped in pragmatism. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it's a website, a content management system, or the very language that underpins the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the Web consultancy firm Clearleft. He wrote the books DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, and most recently, HTML5 For Web Designers. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane.