Following his announcement of the release candidate last month, Timothy Falconer of Squeakland has now announced the full release of Etoys 4, which you can now download from their website.

The Squeakland Fall newsletter has the Etoys 4 release notes which detail the changes you’ll find, in English and Spanish. The newsletter also has some thoughts by Scott Wallace on this release which completes the hand-over of Squeak Etoys from Viewpoints Research to the newly formed Squeakland Foundation.

To publicise some of the work being done using Etoys, the Squeakland site has a new feature: the Squeakland Showcase. Everyone can now share their projects directly from Etoys to the website, where the Etoys community can then benefit from the many surprising and useful Etoys examples that are available.

Timothy invites anyone using Squeak or Etoys, to consider adding their name to their Squeakers list. More than 175 people from 35 countries have signed, which really shows the enthusiasm and reach of Etoys throughout the world.

Timothy adds “Special thanks to the Squeakland software team, particularly Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, and Scott Wallace for their tremendous efforts in the last month. Your hard work really shows!”

It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.

First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay. Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.

Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.

My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and Usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!

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Lullabot is pleased to announce the second annual Do It With Drupal Seminar. This 3-day event is focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities.

The event is geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience. For new site-builders and decision-makers, DIWD will offer a great introduction to Drupal and the Drupal community. For more experienced Drupalers, DIWD will offer a great chance to pick up tips and tricks straight from the module developers themselves and a chance to connect and socialize with other Drupal professionals.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar will feature the following highlights:

• Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
• Discover new site-building strategies
• Learn from Drupal's top developers
• Hear from social media and social networking experts
• Connect with other Drupal professionals
• Expand your Drupal knowledge

This commercially produced event takes place at the Marriott Hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter, December 9, 10, 11, 2009 and features sessions by many "big names" from both inside and outside of the Drupal community (see list of current speaker list below).

The current list of speakers includes...

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Whether it's for pleasure or business, or both, Twitter automation is a must for anyone who wants to use Twitter effectively. GoTwitr is a new site whose primary goal is to make it easy for people to grow and manage their Twitter communities.

It’s also a tool to help new Twitter users get started quickly and easily. GoTwitr’s unique invitation model makes it extremely easy for any Twitter user to get his friends and family connected to Twitter. GoTwitr uses a unique new concept to deliver quality followers, and promote you to other twitter users that share common interests and passions.

GoTwitr was built in Drupal 6. Drupal’s external site integration tools made it easy to bypass the normal Drupal registration and login and use the “Login with Twitter” service.

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Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization is a new Drupal book authored by Ben Finklea and published by Packt Publishing. It’s a practical, step-by-step guide that takes the mystery out of Drupal search engine optimization (SEO) by showing you the tricks of today's top marketing pros to achieve top ranking in the search engines.

Packt Publishing is generously offering a 15% discount to any Drupal.org readers. To purchase Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization with this discount, visit www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-search-engine-optimization-seo/book and provide the code DrupalSEO15 (case sensitive) at check out. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

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Noury Bouraqadi wrote to the squeak-dev mailing list with news that French Smalltalk users are holding their eighth annual SmalltalkParty in Paris on Saturday 28th November 2009.

The empahsis is on short presentations, so there promises to be plenty of interesting presentations. Items already planned for discussion include:

• Speed dating with Smalltalk—Smalltalk in 15 min
• Pharo: a Smalltalk vision
• Profiler in Smalltalk
• Mondrian  visualisations
• Seaside by example
• Small Parser—an executable grammar-based parser
• Helvetia: A framework for DSLs
• Coral: a Smalltalk scripting Langage
• F-Script 2.0 news

The session will be held at Ecole des Mines de Paris, Boulevard Saint Michel – Paris and runs from 09:00 to 17:00.

For more information (in French) see the SmalltalkParty webpage.

Packt Publishing, the company behind many well-known Drupal books, holds an annual Open Source CMS Award that recognizes open source content management platforms and their communities. In addition to bragging rights, winners also receive financial support for their projects in the form of cash prizes. Drupal has historically done very well in this competition, winning the overall award for the last two years running, as well as Best PHP Open Source Content Management System in last year's competition. This record of success is a tribute to the strength and passion of the Drupal community, as the awards are partially decided by popular vote.

In fact, Drupal has done so well in past years that the organizers of this year's award have retired it from eligibility for the overall award, instead pitting it against Joomla! in an all-new Hall of Fame category. In addition, they've created a Drupal Award to allow community members to vote fortheir favorite modules and themes. And if that wasn't enough, Drupal is also eligible for the Best Open Source PHP CMS award. All told, around $6,000 in prize money is at stake.

How can you help Drupal win again this year? Just go to Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award Web site before October 30 and cast your vote in the following categories:

• Hall of Fame
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Drupal Award

And to provide a little extra incentive, three voters who go to the site and fill out a brief survey will also win a free iPod Touch.

Show your support for Drupal and vote today!

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Trócaire is a leading Irish overseas development agency that works with amazing people to bring about positive and lasting changes in some of the world’s poorest places. Last year, Trócaire spent over €60 million on 124 programmes across 38 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Their programmes are carried out with partner organisations so local people drive the whole process and, in turn, their own development.

The programmes aim to:

• Build a reliable way of life and help people cope with climate change
• Respond to emergencies and disasters
• Tackle injustice and defend human rights
• Address the HIV and AIDS crisis
• Support gender equality

Trócaire's annual 'Lent campaign' is the single largest fundraising campaign in Ireland and enjoys huge support from the Irish public each year. Trócaire's website www.trocaire.org has become a key fundraising tool for the organisation and an essential way to show supporters the impact of its work and increase awareness.

Annertech built the Trócaire site using Drupal 6 and many contributed modules. In general, we used Migrate to pull in the data from the existing CMS, CCK to build the content, Views to list it, and Panels to arrange the items on a page. For example, the home page is a panel page containing several mini-panels, views and other blocks.

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Oct 14 2009: What's going on ! Yet another good small CMS emerges from the pack. Added phpSQLiteCMS.
Oct 10 2009: added Zikula CMS framework.
Oct 9 2009: added XMLNuke, XML CMS framework.
Oct 4 2009: discovered gpEasy CMS.

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Since the 5.0 release, Drupal core has included an installer that supports installation profiles to setup and configure a site for a certain use-case. In theory this allows for people to create a better "out of the box" solution by configuring Drupal like a wiki, a conference, or a publishing site. If done right, installation profiles have the potential to help end-users get sites done faster and accelerate the adoption of Drupal. However, this promise has yet to be realized, and this core Drupal feature is currently being vastly underutilized.

As part of their grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Deproduction and Quiddities want to help realize the benefit that install profiles have to offer. The Drupal Association, with the support of individual and corporate sponsors, has put forth a matching grant to help see that it meets its mission of supporting the Drupal project. The potential to help address the usability problems of people trying to get started with Drupal is truly enormous.

Read on for details on how installation profiles work, why they are important, how packaging them will help, and the technical decisions behind the way the packaging scripts will work. Now is the chance to provide feedback which might make it into the code before it goes live by the end of November.

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Oct 8 2009: I've neglected the subject but there seems to be growing interest in business rules management.

James Taylor wrote an short article about business rule management ( BRM ) a few days ago, Business Rules Management – the misunderstood partner to process.

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The SqueakDBX team have been very busy recently working on their OpenDBX plugin which allows Squeak users to perform relational database operations (including DDL and DML as well as SQL) through an open source library.

Their new release, Version 1.1, now supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sqlite3, Oracle and MSSQL on Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as incorporating a number of performance refactorings.

They’ve also found time to build a new website for SqueakDBX, which contains lots of documentation and links to useful resources.

To get a better idea of the features of SqueakDBX, and of the work that the team have been doing, have a look at their ESUG 2009 presentation. You can also follow their work at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakdbx

TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History campaign. GCCA's brand is TckTckTck, to indicate that "time is running out" and the web is at the core of GCCA's strategy.

With over 50 diverse and established NGO partners driving the bus, their own unique mandate as a central unifying force, GCCA had to balance two competing yet interconnected elements. First, supporting partners, ensuring they fill a unique role; adding value and always supporting, not competing with partner interests. Second, direct public engagement: providing a strong, unifying global center-point for media and world leaders; organizing new supporters who aren't reached by an existing NGO partner, and supporting new partners who have low online organizing engagement capacity.

The partner organizations are all running their own independent campaigns but using the TckTckTck brand, pointing to the website, and together, in less than a week, they aggregated nearly 1,000,000 supporters to the cause!

Advomatic built the TckTckTck site with Drupal 6 and several staple contributed modules. In general, we used CCK to build the content, Views to list the content, and Panels to arrange the lists on a page. For instance, the home page is a panel page with several Views blocks pulling in content.

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It's nearly 6 months since the release of Cracking Drupal, which makes for a nice milestone to talk about the book and mention a few related developments. Cracking Drupal was written by me (Greg Knaddison - or "greggles") with reviews and assistance from various members of the community with the well-known Károly Négyesi (chx) as the main technical editor.

The book's target audience is broad: site admins who know a little coding, developers who are deep in module development and selection, and front end developers (aka themers) who modify their template.php and tpl.php files.

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Oct 5 2009: Red Hat Asks Supreme Court To Nix Software Patents.  The range of comments is also interesting. 

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... the job-search-engine.com job site for Business Rule Engine Architects.

Not all are statutory H1B postings, some are definitely non-H1B agencies.  Others say explicitly that they offer no HB1 sponsorships, perhaps because they already have their own H1Bs lined up for the contract ?  It's possible.

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Oct 4 2009: Add Wikyblog. Updated WikkaWiki with info about burgeoning project for phpMtEdit package

Updated Jan 25 2009: added Kisimi and DokuWiki

There are several small, fast and powerful open source wikis that can be used as a full-featured CMS to for building small web sites and are fairly easy to extend and customize.

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Timothy Falconer wrote to the squeak-dev mailing list to announce the Squeak Etoys 4 release candidate, in preparation for final release on 21st October.

This release is the product of nine months of work by the Etoys software team, and several weeks of sprinting by Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace and Timothy.

The Etoys team are now looking for your input: Timothy says “Please help us test the new Etoys! We want to make sure that it’s rock solid before getting used in schools and homes throughout the world”.

You can download the Etoys 4 release candidate at http://squeakland.org/download under “Release Candidates”.

Highlights of Etoys 4 include:

• loading and sharing projects directly to the central Squeakland Showcase
• fully “license clean”, so that it can be included in Linux distros
• improved toolbar and viewer
• optional drop-down categories for the project info box
• lots of fixes and new translations throughout

To learn more about what’s new in Etoys 4, you can watch an interview with Scott Wallace or an introduction to the new beta showcase.

If you find any problems in the release candidate, you can try the Etoys chat channel, or post in the forums, or if you’re able to reproduce the error, add a ticket to the issue tracker.

Timothy passes on special thanks to everyone who made suggestions or helped the team to test the betas, saying “We’d be nowhere without our community!”

The Saint Louis Review is a local Catholic diocesan newspaper serving the nearly 500,000 member Archdiocese of Saint Louis. The newspaper has had a website since the late 90s, which was ported to a custom-designed CMS in 2001. The PHP/MySQL-based site ran quite well throughout the first decade of this millennium, but was in need of either a serious overhaul or a redesign, to go along with the paper's new tabloid layout in April 2009.

The decision was made in 2007 to port the website to Joomla, but after a few months, a new editor, and more work, it was determined that, due to its extensibility, flexible out-of-the-box permissions, and standards/SEO-compliant codebase, Drupal would be a better fit for the site. Work was begun in January of 2009 to transfer the custom CMS' articles database (over 17,000 articles) to a Drupal site, create a new template based off the colors and design of the new tabloid-format paper, and integrate an easier-to-manage ad system and back-end.

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There's lots of exciting news about Groups.Drupal.org which was launched over three years ago as a

a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups.

Three years since and there are almost 650 groups on the site and over 51,000 subscriptions to those groups with over 700,000 page views each month. A glorious hub indeed.

Many users will now enjoy the magic "single sign on" from bakery, but some accounts couldn't be synched automatically. If you have problems logging in to the site please follow the instructions on the account synch request form.

Along with the redesign and upgrade happening for drupal.org, Groups.Drupal.org is being upgraded. Moshe Weitzman is leading the charge on this effort. Moshe has decided that this upgrade makes a good point to pass along some maintenance responsibilities for the site to Josh Koenig and Greg Knaddison.

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