Drupal 6 Social Networking, by Michael Peacock, is a new book from Packt Publishing, aimed at readers wishing to create a Social Networking website. With Social Networking being a very powerful and popular concept on the Internet, this book discusses the benefits of creating your own Social Network over utilising existing Social Networks, and guides the reader through setting up a Social Network of their own.

After discussing Social Networking concepts, the book covers the basics of Drupal including installation, configuration and administration, before looking at building a powerful Social Networking website, including:

• User generated content with Drupal core modules
• Managing users and enhancing their profiles
• Enabling user interaction and communication as well as communicating with our users
• Creating a simple map-based module to show how we can extend the network with custom features by creating our own modules
• Customising the theme, and creating custom themes giving the Social Network a unique look of its own
• Deploying the Social Network, and keeping it running smoothly
• Promoting the Social Network so that its user base, and community contributions grow

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[Update: The Survey Monkey account is now increased.]

Did you attend Drupalcon D.C? Did you want to attend Drupalcon D.C but couldn't make it?

We have lots of questions and you have answers!

Take the Drupalcon D.C survey and help make Drupalcon your conference! We are looking for responses from those who attended and those who were unable to attend the conference. We want to hear from you.

Help make future DrupalCons, including DrupalCon Paris 2009, even better!

Click over to take the survey.

Today's Documentation Sprint at DrupalCon DC was a brilliantly productive success! For folks who are unfamiliar with the sprint concept, as I was before today, here's what happened: folks gathered both physically in DC and virtually on IRC (#drupal-docs) to come up with a list of documentation tasks that need tackling. We then divided up into small, ad-hoc teams to collaboratively tackle those tasks.

By our conservative estimate, more than 70 people showed up in person. Folks also participated online in a great demonstration of the potential for real-time collaboration despite geographical distance. All of the work was done in the hopes of creating cleaner, clearer, and more accessible and useful documentation for members of the Drupal community, whatever their skill level or familiarity with Drupal might be. Likewise, people at all levels of familiarity and experience with Drupal participated in the documentation sprint itself.

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Following the final day of DrupalCon presentations, we're hosting a code and documentation sprint, both at the DrupalCon conference facility and online. You can help! Documentation sprinters are coordinating tasks on wiki-style pages and talking on IRC at #drupal-docs (see instructions for joining).

Six new Drupal projects will make it easier for anyone to join the digital conversation by lowering the barriers to online publishing. These projects have received a portion of the $485,380 in funding provided by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI). The winners of the Knight Drupal Initiative were announced at the DrupalCon conference in Washington, DC.

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Over the past two and a half months, Sony Music rolled out some of their top musical artist sites in new multilingual versions based on Drupal 6. P!nk, Beyonce, Britney Spears, John Legend, Kelly Clarkson and The Fray were among the first to go multilingual, with many more on the way.

Before introducing multilingual support, Sony Music had a solid platform built on Drupal 5 from which they delivered dozens of major artist websites with interactive and social networking features. But having their sites in English only presented significant barriers. Going multilingual would allow them to expand fan bases and reach out to new audiences.

In addition to their team of in-house developers and other contractors, Sony Music sponsored CivicActions to improve internationalization support in Drupal, contributing back all development work. CivicActions guided the internationalization of Sony Music's platform and ensured stability as they upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Accomplishing these aims required an intensive focus on reviewing and upgrading the large selection of core and contributed modules Sony Music relies on. Sony Music's investment in improving the Drupal platform demonstrates the sound business case for contributing back.

Here's a summary of how we approached the work and how this project produced internationalization improvements throughout Drupal core and contrib that can be used on any site wanting to serve users in multiple languages and countries.

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DrupalCon DC 2009 note: Ben Jeavons and Matthew Saunders of pingVision and Mollee Bauer, founder/owner of Pregnancy.org, will be making a case study presentation of the design and development of Pregnancy.org at 6:00 pm, Wednesday, March 4th at DrupalCon. [See the DrupalCon DC 2009 schedule.] Any videos or supplementary materials from that presentation will be linked here sometime after the presentation.

Since 2001, Pregnancy.org has been an informational and community resource for women about fertility, pregnancy, labor and child care. In November 2008, Pregnancy.org was relaunched in Drupal 6, with a new design and development by pingVision.

The site ran previously in a highly modified version of PHP-Nuke which had gotten so unmanageable that the managers were posting static pages and building navigation just to avoid having to deal with Nuke's increasingly cumbersome quirks. The site was also fitted with several custom "tools," providing special features for site members who were pregnant, wanting to get pregnant, or have babies. Forums on the site ran in vBulletin.

Even with these drawbacks, the site was enjoying high activity by site members, and very good search engine rankings. And yet, with the software the way it was, and the design growing a bit stale, Pregnancy.org founder and CEO Mollee Bauer retained pingVision to implement an entire revamp of the site across the board, from a new logo to the back-end software.

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Late in 2008, an idea began to gather steam. The idea was to launch a news website about Canadian motocross, but not just another site that dealt with the industry from a sterile, detached viewpoint. Direct Motocross was born from a passion to create a site that captured the true spirit of Canadian motocross, the grit and the grime and the grease.

Drupal has strong credentials in news websites, so we saw it as an ideal fit. Using Drupal also meant that we could quickly incorporate links to popular social media websites, sophisticated (but intuitive) image handling, and more.

All this planning was taking place against the backdrop of the most severe economic downturn in 80 years, and Drupal made it possible to develop a feature-rich website without requiring an extensive team of developers. What's more, core development took place during a very tight development window, as we wanted the site to launch on Jan 1, 2009.

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Drupal 6.10 and 5.16, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as a critical security vulnerability, are now available for download.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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The Georgia Straight is Canada's largest urban weekly: a Vancouver-based newsmagazine with a per-issue readership of almost 534,000.

Founded in 1967, the paper was critical of local politicians and police and was soon faced with fines for publishing obscenities and police raids. As time went on the "Straight", as locals call it, became more established, but maintained a progressive editorial stance. Straight.com is the newspaper's online presence.

Straight.com, in addition to publishing content from the print publication, is focussed on providing web-exclusive content and building online community. Site content includes special-interest blogs, video and audio, image galleries, and searchable listings for events, restaurants, clubs, and movies.

Before conversion to Drupal, Straight.com used a number of methods and technologies to update the website. Originally static HTML, then outsourced, the Straight ultimately brought site management in-house, moving first to the Publish Button CMS then to a custom Cold Fusion-based content management system.

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Row Eleven Wine Company in Marin County, CA came to ISL Consulting determined to create an online store that reflected the many sides of this unique specialty wine producer. It had to both serve the company's immediate objective to sell more wine online and be able to incorporate a number of new features in the coming years.

Since the company had a number of specialty wines, at least three separate branding sites were needed, run by the same administrators.

The firm’s founder, Richard de los Reyes, a charismatic winemaker, needed his own blog to share his thoughts and deep knowledge of Napa Valley vintner history.

A single e-commerce shopping cart was needed to integrate products across all brands. Finally, the platform needed to be able to incorporate the first of a growing list of community features, and be expandable in the future to service the needs of the firm’s many distributors and restaurants in the coming years.

ISL recommended Drupal because it would allow, with a little training, largely non-technical managers to run the website. The registration system could allow Row Eleven to begin building relationships with its community of customers and re-sellers.

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Thanks to the work of numerous people through free time contributions, our upgrade sprint in Cambridge, MA, and several testing and bugfixing hours committed by the community, today we were finally ready to make the jump and upgrade drupal.org to Drupal 6. Our site runs several interesting modules, many of which receive little love outside our infrastructure, plus we are running on multiple database servers and webservers with several other helper components in the backend. So while we crafted a fine plan for the upgrade, it took a few more hours then originally planned.

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On Tuesday, February 17, 2009, the Drupal Association General Assembly held its third election. The Drupal Association elected both new permanent members to the Drupal Association, and a new Board of Directors.

There were 27 candidates who submitted applications to the Drupal Association, which includes existing members re-applying for board positions in 2009. Of those, we elected six new members as permanent members, and a board consisting of eight individuals.

Specific vote results are itemized below the break.

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The Trinidad Guardian, one of 3 popular newspapers in Trinidad, re-launched their website on New Years Day 2009 using Drupal 5. The site has a simple design done by their in-house graphics designer Ms. Maxie Navarro. The Drupal developer behind it, Shivan Jaikaran, would like to share his techniques as a tech case study.

The old site was a plain html site and did not provide much (if any) flexibility in terms of multiple updates, RSS, scheduled workflow or fostering a community website with features such as comments. Drupal was decided upon internally as the CMS of choice to overcome such drawbacks. It was imperative that the editors be allowed to update the site simultaneously, remotely and without much programming skills....features that were not possible with the old site.

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Great news! On Thursday evening, the Drupal Association board chose Paris to host the next European Drupalcon.

First of all we want to congratulate the teams from the other two candidate cities, Maastricht and Cologne. We know they worked hard, spent a lot of energy and did a great job. We're looking forward to working with you all — your help and experience will be more than welcome...

Paris is a good city for open source software, a great city for Drupal and, frankly, a fantastic place to visit. The community here has become increasingly active over the past two years and is excited to host enthusiastic Drupalers from around the world.

We want the conference to be attractive to as many Drupalers as possible. This is why the conference will feature tracks for coders, designers, site builders and students as well as companies and entrepreneurs thinking about using Drupal.

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Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions is a step-by-step guide to building your business website in Drupal, complete with a blog, events calendar, catalogue of products and services, and more. As always, Packt Publishing will be donating a percentage of all book sales directly to the Drupal Association.

Author Mark Noble will show you how to build a complete website for a fictional client from scratch. He starts at the beginning by downloading and installing Drupal, progressing to creating and editing pages, through to exploring the most popular modules for Drupal. All functionality is presented in a clear step-by-step format which is easy to follow as you build your own site.

This book explores several modules that will allow you to do everything from adding calendars and events to integrating content from Flickr and YouTube. Each chapter adds some features to your website that will bring you closer to your customers.

At the end of the book, you should be able to build a site on your own. If you are new to Drupal this book will give you the confidence and knowledge to hire a professional to develop a site for you which meets your business needs. Regardless of whether you build your own, or work with a professional Drupal developer, this book will help you to develop a site that connects you to your customers and will find ways to make you more money.

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In late August 2008 Grey Vancouver was awarded the contract to redesign the Vancouver Magazine website. Vancouver’s premier magazine covers the events, people and issues that make this city so vibrant. Mixing quality journalism with definitive service content, it reflects Vancouver’s emergence as a dynamic international urban centre.

Despite the amount of content published, Vancouver Magazine did not utilize a CMS system. All documents were authored and uploaded as static files using Dreamweaver, a process that involved manual tracking of files and updates in multiple locations. By leveraging a modern, scalable CMS they are able to make their web presence dynamic, mixing in social elements (comments, ability to share links) and giving their audience multiple ways to consume the content (location search, RSS, editor's picks).

Based on VanMag’s requirement of a solid content management system that could also foster an online community, Drupal was a natural choice. The precedent for Drupal based publishing websites for print magazines had already been demonstrated by Spin, PopSci and US Magazine. In addition, the client preferred Drupal’s open source license as there was no vendor lock-in to contend with.

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This week, twelve of us have gathered in Paris to continue our work on upgrading drupal.org. Sprinters include: Joeri Poesen, Damien Tournoud, Neil Drumm, Mike O'Conner, Gerhard Killesreiter, Klaas Van Waesberghe, Todd Ross Nienkerk, Aaron Stanush, David Stosik, Morten Heide, Gábor Hojtsy and myself. Upgrading and redesigning drupal.org is a big project, and, when implemented, will be an important milestone for our community. We're hopeful that we can push the drupal.org redesign closer to completion this week.

This week in Paris, our group is split into two teams. One group will implement the new theme designed by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt with the involvement of many people in our community. The second group will continue where we left off in Boston and will also start implementing some of the new functionality planned for the new drupal.org (e.g. better search, improved project pages, better landing pages, a jobs page, an events page, and more).

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In October 2008, NuMedia Advantage launched the new Just Racing UK website, a racing and Triathlon (running, cycling and swimming) event management website. The build process was relatively complicated, involving a lot of modules, some of which were dropped, some of which worked right out the box, and some of which required a good degree of hacking and customisation.

Just Racing's first website was created by a different design company and offered the visitor the ability to view up and coming race events, and book races electronically through a third party. As well as bulking out the process for the visitor, Just Racing incurred very high processing fees.

We were asked to take inspiration from the exiting site, but add the ability to: -

• Promote and Process events
• Offer payment processing online
• Vary sponsorships
• Create and manage online start-lists (based upon age and swim-times)
• Display previous years race results
• Manage race-specific newsletter subscriptions
• Utilise an existing database

It went without saying, but a fresh new look was also required.

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This past week, a group of serious Drupal developers assembled in Cambridge, MA to work on upgrading Drupal.org and infrastructure. This team includes Damien Tournoud, Derek Wright, Neil Drumm, David Strauss, Chad Phillips, Jeremy Andrews, Narayan Newton, Austin Smith, Moshe Weitzman, Dries Buytaert, Susan MacPhee and Gábor Hojtsy, and others helping through virtual channels. The team included performance experts, project module maintainers, an infrastructure manager and others. It was a great fit for our goals.

We worked hard, putting in 12-14 hour days, fleshing out solutions over breakfast, lunch and dinner, leaving a short time to sleep. We took on a big job: updating Drupal.org to Drupal 6, accomplishing as much as possible while in the same room. We managed to run test upgrades multiple times a day, integrating everyone’s work, testing interactions of new items as they became ready.

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