The University of Prince Edward Island is a public university located in Charlottetown, PEI on the east coast of Canada. This project is the second phase of our build of Drupal at the university. In it we are hoping to use our theming layer to provide context for clients who may be lost around our various multisite installations. We are also considering how to effectively repurpose the content that we are creating on our main website to make an interesting and effective mobile site.

We've been using Drupal full-time at the university for two years now and it has actually shrunk to 'only' a 100 database multisite installation. All development, maintenance, design and conceptual/marketing consultation are done by our little shop of three at Integrated Communications. Our clients on campus are responsible for the content on their own sites. The project's lead is Dave Cormier, our lead Drupal developer is Yuxing Huang, and our all 'round client services/Drupal guy is Shawn Arsenault.

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Over the last few years the Drupal project has been evolving its relationship with hosting companies and the hosting industry.

As part of our ongoing outreach efforts, the Drupal community is having a Drupal booth at Hostingcon, in Washington DC, on August 10-12th. Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh Hosting, is staffing the Drupal booth and doing a presentation about Drupal on the expo floor to the Hostingcon attendees. If you are in the DC area, the conference is running for 2 more days.

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The Drupal community is alive with meetups, user groups, and camps. However, there isn't a published formula on using Drupal to accomplish the needs of a large meetup, camp, or convention. This By Them worked with LA Drupal organizers to design and develop what we hope will be a useful camp formula for others, available for download under the GPL.

DrupalCampLA.com was built on Drupal 6 using core & contributed modules to handle event registration, sponsorship management, featured speakers, user bio's, and session proposals. The website features an attendee driven event schedule where members propose sessions and only registered members pick which sessions they'd like to see (in the BarCamp style). Planning the schedule for the day of events has been made flexible enough to allow organizers to maintain a master schedule with ease. Not to mention that all attendees get their own schedule view with the sessions they pick.

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In heavy testing of the proposed update of the automated testing infrastructure, we decided it was not yet ready to deploy. However, the other code we wanted to upgrade was successfully installed and the database updates ran without error. Therefore, the downtime really went from 12:47am until 1:09am UTC on Friday 2009-08-14. We're sorry it started late, but the extra testing allowed us to avoid trouble that would have led to an even longer window with the site off-line.

Unfortunately, most of the new code isn't very end-user visible, so there's not much to point at on the upgraded site to show off. But, it's going to let us roll out more changes and new features in the future (without needing to take the site offline).

Thanks again for your patience and understanding, and please accept our apologies for the late start.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, located in Milton, Delaware, is one of the 25 largest microbrewers in North America. Starting in 1995, Dogfish Head went from a backroom operation of three little kegs with propane burners underneath to a full-fledged brewery and bottling powerhouse. They ship and sell beer in over 30 states, are currently expanding their brewery, branching out with restaurant franchises, and continue to grow.

The Dogfish Head brand prides itself on a ‘do it yourself’, ‘off-centered’, grassroots style work ethic. When it came time for them to choose a company to build their website, they chose another ‘off-centered’ company, Inclind Inc, not too far from the brewery.

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Drupal 6 Content Administration, by J. Ayen Green, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal users, who are either not developers or are new to Drupal. This book is designed for those who run the site day-to-day but didn't set it up, and aren't necessarily that well versed in Drupal or web technologies, and as a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Foundation!

This is a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide that uses an actual case study. In an interactive and informal manner, this guide presents purposeful examples that continue to build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples mean you can learn quickly how to take care of the content in your Drupal site.

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The Lullabot team is proud to announce its latest Drupal learning tool: Lullabot Online Workshops. The first of these is "Drupal Fundamentals", a six-week course beginning September 9th, 2009. Each week's live 2-hour streaming video-and-multimedia class will focus one one aspect in the process of building and configuring an entire Drupal site.

Students will be able to watch as the site is built and instructors delve deep into specific topics such as taxonomy, comments, building content types with CCK, and creating both simple and complex content listings with Views. Each weekly discussion will conclude with a question-and-answer period with the Lullabot instructors and a homework assignment to reinforce the lesson.

Each student will get his/her own sandbox Drupal site in which they can set up and experiment with Drupal. Each lesson will be recorded and placed in a student-accessible video archive, so whether one is unable to make it to a live session or simply needs to review, the class will be available to them in the archive. Additionally, students will be able to post to class message board where they can discuss lessons with the instructor and other students.

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Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan member organization dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas. The Council was founded in 1921 by academics and diplomats who had advised President Woodrow Wilson on how to deal with the aftermath of World War I. Its 3,400 members include Presidents, Cabinet members, and other high-ranking U.S. government officials, as well as renowned academics, journalists, and major leaders of business, media, human rights, and other non-governmental groups.

Since its inception in 1922, articles and essays published in Foreign Affairs have helped shape political debate and policy on some of the most important issues of the day. Authors who have written for the journal have included influential intellectuals and political leaders ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton.

The new Foreign Affairs Web site, developed by Palantir.net, showcases Drupal’s wide variety of capabilities. In addition to leveraging existing modules, the site features a significant amount of new functionality developed specifically for this project. The magazine's management strongly supports the open source development model, and much of the work done for the site has been or will soon be contributed back to the Drupal community. 

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The short video "What is Drupal?" won six Telly Awards, it was announced earlier this month. The video, produced by pingVision, is a fast-paced promo-style introduction to Drupal. The total running time is about a minute.

The video had its "premiere" of sorts at South by SouthWest this year, playing in the Acquia booth in the Trade Show area.

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Nicolas Petton recently announced on the squeak-dev mailing list the first public release of Iliad, which is succintly described on the Iliad website as a “a flexible, lightweight but powerful Smalltalk web framework.” Originally developed on GNU Smalltalk, but ported to Squeak/Pharo, Iliad features:

• standalone stateful widgets
• nice urls with a simple routing system
• simple API
• easy to setup and deploy (no complicated configuration step)
• javascript layer to update widgets using AJAX. If javascript is not enabled, the behaviour remains the same by making normal requests
• support for the Magritte meta-description framework, for simple generation of views on data

Iliad combines elements of the other leading Smalltalk web frameworks Seaside, Aida/Web and HttpView2. You can find out more about the installation and use of Iliad by reading the documentation on the Iliad site, and on the GNU Smalltalk site.

Last week Development Seed launched Open Atrium, an "intranet in a box" that acts as a foundation for developing custom team collaboration and knowledge management tools. Drupal's strength as a framework and its strong developer community are clearly the reasons we love Drupal, but in this post I specifically want to focus on how installation profiles and the Features module have allowed us to create a tight out of the box experience for Open Atrium.

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Code freeze begins September 1st. During this period, we fix bugs and when Drupal 7 is stable, we release. In the past, we have done manual testing. This time we have an automated testing framework and already a large number of tests. In an ideal world, we would only release when all code is touched by tests. While this won't guarantee that Drupal will be bug free, every test contributes to the overall quality of Drupal.

Two weeks before the code freeze, we will gather in Los Angeles to write tests. This will take us into the darker corners of core, so we also get the chance to fix bugs and, because this precedes the code freeze, we have greater freedom in how to fix them.

Since this sprint is so close to the code freeze, it's an excellent time to raise the test coverage ratio as there will be little new development in the final two weeks.

Please join us! Go to the sprint sign-up page at http://groups.drupal.org/node/22652

Food, beverages, power, IP and chocolate will be provided by our sponsors, Causecast and the The Cherry Hill Company.

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I'm a little later than usual with this summary, so it's a bit long. Get to it.

Yes it is summer (at least in the northern hemisphere) but progress proceeds despite the heat.

Numbered primitives are an affront to the natural dignity of a fine body of code. They're pointless, add complication and reduce extensibility. Kill them now!

The server Squeak People runs on is going to be shut down in the near future. This site runs on mod_virgule which only works under Apache/1.x. We could certainly move this site to another server. But it's non-trivial.

You may have missed these the first time around...

Lots of stuff in this issue. Dig in.

Are you subscribed to the Announcements mailing list? If not I suggest that you subscribe immediately. However even if you were subscribed then you would not have received notice of the announcements I list below.

Have you registered for OOPSLA 2008 yet? Either way you should ensure you are up to date on the latest news.