Drupal Newsletter

Coding standard change for D7

The patch which changes the spacing for the concatenation operator got committed to D7 on April 14, 2008. That means from Drupal 7 onwards, there is a space on both sides of the concat operator (the . that connects strings) instead of just on the non-literal facing side. For contributed modules, this change is optional for D6 compatible code, and recommended for D7.

Drupal 6:

Drupal 7:

ok, to wrap up this newsletter, we need to grab 3-4 of those posts, get permission, and stick teasers in the body. i'd also like to have links to any info about the video from the conference. i've only watched that peripherally; anyone know the status of that?

thanks,
aaron

Sorry I've been a bit absent since DrupalCon -- I'm right up against a big deadline at work for next week, and am behind on writing my book. I just crossed the 1/2 point for the book though, so plan to take an evening or two to get the newsletter in shape.

The newsletter has (access to) a lot of material in it, so it just needs some tweaking to get it ready. I'd like to aim for publishing it Tuesday or Wednesday, so if you have anything that you want to get it at the last minute, this is your chance!

Thanks for the great work from everyone!

Aaron Winborn

Recap of the first topic of my last message, for emphasis:

The obvious topic for the March newsletter is the DrupalCon, of course. There are over 800 people here, though and we need to recruit people to write up their favorite session/s. If you are at the conference, please write up at least one session, and/or find three other people who can write up a session. We only need a paragraph or two, but feel free to write up a whole big article if you're inspired.

Sneak preview of this discussion (if you decide not to click through to the rest of this discussion topic): http://drupal-newsletter.org/issue/2008/01

This DrupalCon has been phenomenal! We had an impromptu BoF session yesterday for the Drupal Newsletter. The three big things that came out of that were a plan for March's newsletter, the newsletter length, and building a stand-alone site for the newsletter.

That was quite an issue we put out there. I've gotten lots of positive feedback about it, and am excited to keep this ball rolling.

Things I personally learned from this issue:

1. Robin's IRC nick is 'self'. And he's available by e-mail...

2. 20 pages might be a bit long for an issue -- we can definitely move stuff to future issues, and talk more about http://newsletter.drupal.org as a possibility for the future.
3. Make sure we put a link to the newsletter in the version that goes out by e-mail.
4. Triple check links before it goes out -- Drupal.org's mail system mangled the anchor links to the TOC.
5. I had to take out all those eye-candy links in the intro paragraph, so it looked better for the e-mail version.
6. Double check that d.o & g.d.o look the same; they use different filters.

Help!

The newsletter is ready. I would like us to publish it today. I'd hoped Amazon could help, but he's been busy this afternoon with DrupalCon business. Is there anyone with the proper privileges who's available right now, or later this evening, who might be able to help?

Thanks,
Aaron Winborn

I just wrote up a sneak peek of Views 2 for the February Drupal Newsletter, which is to be published next week. I'd love some feedback from people in the know before going forward with it. I think the work being done is incredible. The wiki is at http://groups.drupal.org/node/8258 (you have to subscribe to the Drupal Newsletter group to see it).

The newsletter for February is making great progress! We have another excellent interview by Michael, and Alex is finishing up the Feature article for the issue. With the release of Drupal 6, and considering the issue is about done, I think it makes sense to push up the publication date to Tuesday, or even Monday. So if you have been procrastinating, wait no more!

A reminder that we have until February 15 for submissions, so we can spend a few days editing and tweaking. Also after that time will be a culling process, where things that are incomplete or not appropriate for this issue will be moved to the March newsletter or deleted. Publication is planned for the 21st.

Thanks for all the hard work!

Aaron Winborn

Hi all!

We are looking for speakers for the upcoming DrupalCon in Boston. Since you are subscribed to the Newsletters group, you might be especially interested in the "Business and Marketing" track (see http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/business-and-marketing-track-description... ).

This track covers the following topics:

• The Drupal ecosystem
• Businesses learning to use Drupal
• Case studies
• Showcases: NPO, Education, News, Media, Government, Healthcare

"I'll take a swing at the druplicon this week, do you have any thoughts on doing a masthead?" Said brightloudnoise.
"I had an idea about using drupals mast with a newspaper, keeping the same colours, but twotoning the difference of the newspaper in front." Said hal.

Okay, so if you want to join in, all entries will be put to the committee before the April edition of the newsletter.

Most probably, we can get the top five onto the frontpage of the April Drupal Newsletter!

Great work! We published http://drupal.org/newsletter/2008/january and we're ready for the next month. Thanks to all the folks who helped make that ready.

For the next issue, let's get a better structure in place. First, we should make the wiki page for that issue sticky: Robin, or someone with the right access, can you do that? The wiki is http://groups.drupal.org/node/8258 for the February Newsletter.

The January newsletter will be going out hopefully this afternoon. Last call for submissions & edits! http://groups.drupal.org/node/4988

Ok, been reviewing the most recent newsletter, and writing some notes. I've been mostly going through all the modules, to see what modules we might want to highlight. I think we should only feature a few modules, with a paragraph or two about each, ensuring we're featuring mature, maintained, and moderately useful modules.

Some quick ideas I have for newsletter, after discussion with Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg and Franz Hartl:

• cull the groups for posts for the newsletter

• cull planet drupal for the same reason
• write articles about the effects of drupal in the community and in society
• interviews
• tutorials

more to come. post your ideas too!

Drupal Newsletter Team

The Drupal Newsletter Team shall be responsible for publishing the periodic Drupal Newsletter at http://drupal.org/newsletter. They shall meet using this group, at http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-newsletter. Its members shall be all volunteers who subscribe to this group. Whenever the team calls for a vote, any subscribed member may vote. Unless otherwise stated, any vote shall be conducted with a poll (linked to a motion in another post if required for length), with a duration of two weeks, succeeding where a majority of those voting for a pass/fail motion vote to pass the motion. The results of a vote shall be recorded, and the Team shall ensure that it abides by these results.

Here are some proposals, for comment and discussion. I've also added them to the agenda, and will open polls for voting.

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Announcements
This section is for, well, announcements. No action is generally needed for these items.

Business
Items here generally need discussion, sometimes voting, and other action. My idea is that we can flesh things out here, then at the end of each week, post this entire page again as a story for the benefit of folks reading by e-mail. However, that's based on my understanding of this wiki content type and subscriptions. Feel free to correct me or propose something different.

2007 was an excellent year for development and growth in Drupal. With so much going on, it's no surprise that we only got one issue of the newsletter out. I think it's imperative that we help solidify this feeling of accomplishment, to go along with the upcoming release of Drupal 6. There are a lot of people who would like to contribute, but may not be comfortable or accomplished at contributing code, so the newsletter might be a great way to find this involvement.

This is where we'll organize the editorial schedule for this year's newsletters.

I took the outline that Robin did earlier and used it as a placeholder for a few issues.

Issue 1

Theme: ????

• User Space
  ** Drupal Events
  ** Tips & Tricks
  ** Articles
• Interview
• Developer Zone (if you can think of something better, please do!)
  -- Development Drops
  -- Articles

Issue 2

Theme: ????

• User Space
  ** Drupal Events
  ** Tips & Tricks
  ** Articles
• Interview
• Developer Zone (if you can think of something better, please do!)
  -- Development Drops
  -- Articles

Greetings,

the #1 best idea from this post: http://groups.drupal.org/node/6943 is the monthly newsletter. Learn more why.

There is already a newsletter page, but we could do it way better: http://drupal.org/newsletter (Note I don't talk about mailing lists, there are very good mailing lists here: http://drupal.org/mailing-lists. I am talking about building an opt-in EMAIL LIST. This means that only Drupal can send emails to all the list members, but no other member can send an email to others. Also only Drupal sees all the members, and the members are unable to see each other.)

Now that this baby's put to bed, I thought we could try something different.

Working with volunteer groups in the past on releasing newsletters, I've had success in getting things out the door when we've set up an editorial schedule.

An editorial schedule lets you:

• identify or highlight certain themes,
• gives anyone interested in writing a list of subjects to choose from or, at the very least, a range of topics from which to start
• helps set the tone of the publication.
• idenitifies more complex topics that might need multiple articles or more extensive research.

Hi colleagues

Rather belatedly, there's now a wiki page for the next newsletter. We're trying a slightly different process this time in order to spread the work around amongst all those wanting to lend a hand in getting the newsletter out.

To contribute you'll first need to join the Drupal Newsletter group so that you can add to the contents.

Just to bring Robin's link to the forefront, the June 2007 newsletter skeleton wiki is at http://groups.drupal.org/node/4075.

It was buried in one of Robin's comments, and I think it'd be more straightforward if it was given more exposure in the Newsletter group.

I've done a preliminary look-over of the content, and I like it. I'll be writing up a short recap of DrupalCamp Toronto.

The new deadline applies to the planned Drupal track. Please use the provided form to submit proposals and be sure to specify Drupal as the target track.

Hi colleagues

I'm trying to break down discussion of the newsletter into different (but related) areas. So I hope you don't mind another message suggesting how we could go about producing it.

One way of sharing out the work, in order to make it less onerous, would be for a different person to volunteer to take responsibility for each area of the contents. I guess that for most sections we could find somebody who already took an interest in what was new in that area anyway

Hi colleagues

Coincidentally there seems to have been some discussion about the newsletter elsewhere that I wasn't aware of, so apologies in case this group seems a bit disjointed to start with or if I'm repeating things that have already been covered.

As you'll see, I've got in mind that the target audience for the newsletter is not somebody who visits drupal.org regularly. And there's a lot that goes on with the website over the course of a month which it would be useful to bring to the attention of people who are early on in their use of drupal.

Hi colleagues

As other people have also noticed, the drupal newsletter has taken a bit of a sabbatical lately. But before we rush into getting an issue out I thought it would be good to get a bit of a common understanding about who the target audience for it is.

Personally, when I started thinking about the newsletter, the type of person that I though it was most useful for was somebody who:
- doesn't visit drupal.org everyday
- doesn't subscribe to any drupal news feeds
- doesn't work with drupal as part of their paid employment
- uses drupal in connection with a personal hobby or voluntary project they are involved with
- maybe has just one site that are involved in
- doesn't get involved in much (if any) PHP/SQL

Hey everyone!

( and thanks to SimonP for starting this group, and a huge growl to killes who didn't like my posting to the administration newsletter about all this... )

OK, so, we have a lot of volunteers to work on the newsletter, now we just need to sort out who is going to write what and by when. I'm proposing an article submission deadline for June of May 26th, and for July of June 23rd. With the release of the June issue on June 1st.

Also, on the table as a proposal, the following sketch of a newsletter:

- User Space
  - Drupal Events
  - Tips & Tricks
  - Articles
- Interview
- Developer Zone (if you can think of something better, please do!)
  - Development Drops
  - Articles

Final thing we need to work out, is a schedule for editors to know who is going to edit what month, the goal here being so no one person has to bear the full burden of getting a newsletter "setup", and so if someone "retires" someone else can quickly set in to take their place without loosing a year :-P

Let's begin!
Robin