The deadline for submitting sessions proposals for DrupalCon DC is December 10. If you'd like to present but haven't yet submitted, please submit your session before midnight! So far, almost 150 session ideas have been submitted and discuss a variety of topics. It's exciting to have such a large and varied pool to select the final sessions from - and to know that we're well on our way to having a high quality conference.

In the weeks after the deadline, we'll work with a volunteer committee (please contact us if you want to help) to go through the proposals - and in conjunction with the votes each has received - select the best sessions for each track, merge ones that overlap, and ensure that each track has good depth and representation.

The final schedule will be posted to the DrupalCon website in January. If you have a last minute session idea, we have plenty of space for BoF sessions which will be scheduled on the fly.

The Drupal Association is excited to announce that the last iteration, iteration 11, of the Drupal.org redesign is now available for review. Hundreds of Drupal community members and designers have participated in the redesign of Drupal.org.

We have had over 450 comments on 10 posts in the Drupal.org redesign group. Leisa Reichelt, our user experience research lead, has posted over 26 blog entries about the Drupal.org redesign with over 300 comments! Over on Mark Boulton Design, Mark has blogged 6 posts with over 430 comments. Who knew that open source contributors were so passionate about fonts, logos, and brands? Mark Boulton has also blogged three posts on his personal blog. It's been an exciting, educational, and insightful process for everyone who has been involved. If you haven't had a chance to review these 42 blog posts, or the numerous posts about the redesign on Planet Drupal, please take a few hours and get involved now!

Where do we go from here?

Drupal.org base theme

We are now recruiting theme developers from the community to help create both the base theme and Drupal.org site specific themes. The base theme will implement the design style guide developed as part of the redesign deliverables. The Drupal.org specific themes will remain exclusive to Drupal.org web sites: http://association.drupal.org, http://api.drupal.org, http://security.drupal.org, http://infrastructure.drupal.org.

Crooks and Liars is an American liberal blog, which was founded in August of 2004, during the 2004 Presidential election, by John Amato. It was the first video style blog around, starting in a pre-YouTube era. Crooks and Liars has a team of about a dozen volunteers, including administrators, contributors and moderators.   Crooks and Liars has grown immensely since its birth, now averaging  over 230,000 unique visitors per day and over 330,000 page impressions.

Evolution

Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.

As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.

Good news! During the week of December 15, we're organizing a 5-day Fields in Drupal core code sprint at Acquia! The goal is to get CCK functionality into Drupal 7.

So far, Karen, Yves and Barry have signed up -- Karen and Yves are the main CCK maintainers, and Barry has done a lot of work on CCK as well.

To help us fund the sprint, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. We need money for airline tickets, hotel rooms, food and transportation. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive core and CCK experience.

I've tentatively worked out a budget of $7,000 USD, which covers flight, food and hotel costs for at least four people (Karen, Yves, and two additional people). Since Acquia is covering my travel expenses and allowing Barry to participate all week long, that gives us six people working on CCK-fields-in-core for an entire week. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or donated to the Drupal Association.

To guarantee that Yves and Karen can attend, Acquia is funding Yves' and Karen's hotel and airplane tickets if enough money can't be raised through donations. Acquia is also providing working space in our Andover office.

We'll try to allow people to participate in the sprint remotely, and provide a daily update on our progress. If you're interested and available to participate, join the Fields in Core group, enable e-mail notifications, and block time in your calendar between December 15 and December 19. We'll use the Fields in Core group to plan and to let you know how you can contribute and participate.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal outside of education as well.