DrupalCamp Austin 2009 will be held November 14-15, 2009, at the Norris Conference Centers in Austin, Texas. Admission is limited, so register today!

Session submissions are open to all attendees. So far, we've lined up several excellent speakers:

• Josh Koenig of Chapter Three
• Matt Cheney of Chapter Three
• Ben Finklea of Volacci
• Nathan Smith, creator of the 960.gs grid system

As part of its role of supporting the Drupal project, the Drupal Association (DA) offers occasional help in planning and organizing and funding Drupal code sprints.

Code sprints are an important way that advances are made in Drupal development, both in core and in contributions. Sprints are generally self-organized and self-funded: individuals interested in participating communicate with each other, choose a time and place, and get sponsorship as needed for travel expenses, a venue, etc. from their employers, clients, and other sources.

As part of the big update to Drupal 6.0, groups is now running the latest and greatest OG Panels stack, including Panels 3.0, Chaos Tools 1.0 with the awesome Page Delegator, and the newly independent and 6.0 compatible OG Panels module.

This is a great thing for our future as a dynamic community, and it means that group maintainers can continue to use Panels to trick-out their Organic Groups. However, the complexity of the update and the changes from Views 1 to 2 mean that much of the content that was previously configured in panels no longer worked as it previously had. Unfortunately, groups admins will need to refurbish and/or recreate their homepages.

All your old pages are there, and the UI should be familiar. There are also some nice new options and more coming soon. However, all panels pages are un-published and no homepages are in effect, so you'll need to review them and republish when ready. Please use this thread to ask questions on the topic of OG Panels.

UPDATE: a wiki page with instructions is starting to come together here.

Mail processing got stopped. It's working again, but is sending out a bunch of mail. Sorry about both the lag and the massive inflow.

As you may have noticed today, we are busily upgrading this site.

We, in this case, is the g.d.o focused team of Moshe, Josh, Greg with support from David Strauss, Narayan Newton and a few other special guests here in Paris.

We have a longer explanation/announcement post coming up and are just waiting for a couple more fixes we hope to make in the next few days. Until then, though, one big announcement:

Logins Switch to Single Sign on - May be Broken :(

Good news! Logins are now driven off of drupal.org logins. If you're looking at this as a logged out user, click the user link and you should be all set. We're still sorting out how to make the links all work perfectly.

Bad news! We matched up most of the existing accounts, but there are about 8,000 of you that won't be able to login here. If you are one of those people, please create an Account synch request with links to your user profiles on both sites. We will use comments on the synch request to communicate to you (hopefully that it's done) but if we have questions you can use the infrastructure queue to discuss. If you have multiple accounts, now is the time to pick the account you want to use.

I'm at DrupalCon Paris right now, and between the amazing people, interesting sessions, and gorgeous City of Lights, I only have a few moments, but I wanted to make a quick (and exciting) announcement. The Google Summer of Code officially wrapped up last week, and the Drupal students and mentors did an amazing job this year. “How amazing?," you ask. Well, not only did all 18 of the students that worked directly with Drupal mentors successfully complete their projects, but we got an extra bonus successful student.

The top priority in the Drupal documentation roadmap that was published earlier this summer was to reorganize the information architecture (IA) of the handbooks to make them easier to use and maintain. Becca Scollan volunteered to take the lead and she has been researching and building out a plan of attack. We are now at a good stage to start doing some work that the whole community can engage in.

With over 500 camp attendees and 60+ session proposals, us organizers of Drupal Camp LA needed a Drupal site that was built for organizers and attendees, with lessons learned from 3+ DrupalCons & 2+ DrupalCamps. Here is our formula for our awesome camp site.

"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."

"The web site was based on the latest Drupal 6.x release and utilized many of the current generation modules such as CCK for content customization, imagefield and imagecache to handle imaging Views & custom theming built on Zen for content presentation." (A full list of the modules used is in the case study - http://drupal.org/node/519100 )

The download link is available in the case study post - http://drupal.org/node/519100 and has been made available by LA Drupal & This By Them.

From 1st of August to 9th of September 2009, I'm travelling from Nicaragua over El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize to México. During the trip, I'm doing drupal workshops with people of the free software community.

Del 1 de Agosto hasta el 9 de Septiembre 2009, estoy viajando desde Nicaragua hasta México, pasando por El Salvador, Guatemala y Belize. Realizo talleres de drupal con comunidades de software libre durante este viaje.

The inaugural Drupalcamp Atlanta is now open for registration, and will be held on Saturday, September 19th from 9am – 5pm on the beautiful campus of Kennesaw State University. Our mission and purpose is twofold: (1.) we want to educate people about Drupal and (2.) further evangelize Drupal within our geographic region.

I have been harboring some growing concerns about the direction of the plugin manager integration proposals for Drupal core almost since their inception, but have not been able to make an informed opinion on the subject until I had properly reviewed the proposed system on a much deeper scale.

While my impressions of the project and the current implementation are fairly negative, I have aimed to frame my criticisms in a positive constructive manner because I believe that the goals of the project are worthwhile, and that for a large section of users this could be a very flexible and usable solution.

Unfortunately a lot of my concerns have been well founded, and I believe that the implementation of this system needs to be taken in a different direction for it to be able to succeed in its goals, while not negatively affecting projects like Aegir, Open Atrium and many other ‘serious developers’.