The Boston Drupal conference will have tracks, planned sessions, as well as sessions from the community. We had 31 Drupal sessions at OSCMS, and 93 sessions at Barcelona. While both of these conferences were highly successful, this year the conference organizers are aiming to raise the bar even higher in terms of session quality.

• Business and marketing track
• Design and user experience track
• Site building track
• Community and core

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Drupalcon Boston 2008 registration is now open. Please register for the conference site, and then pay your $195 conference fee. You can also purchase a conference sponsorship for your organization, and learn about the benefits that best meet your organizations needs.

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I’ve been showing off this module privately, but it is now time to broadcast the news. Drupal theming has taken a major leap forward. Watch the screencast. Let me be the first to welcome a thousand terrific new designs and designers to our project.

The new module is called Theme developer and it can be downloaded as part of the devel project. We have built Firebug for Drupal Theming. You may now click on any part of the page and a sexy popup display shows which theme function/template outputted the HTML, and what other files could have done so. Armed with this info, a themer may quickly and accurately override the presentation. Further, all the variables passed into the template/function are presented for review.

Watch the screencast
Implementation notes

• The basic idea of the module is that it uses hook_theme_registry_alter() to make itself receive all theme calls. Thus, it logs all the variables that are received and the templates that could have been called, and were eventually called, and so forth. It finally delegates to the original theme function for generating the HTML. Finally, it takes the generated HTML and wraps it in span tags in order to identify what HTML belongs to what theme call. Those span tags get classes attached for the red border that follows the cursor.
• The popup window gets all its data from a huge javascript array in Drupal.settings. This array stores data about each call.
• In order to receive the same drill down behavior as in the screencast for the variables listing, you should install krumo. See the README file.

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digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Drupal_6_0_Release_Candidate_2_Released';

We are proud to present to you the second release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing for you, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the first release candidate, we have fixed various issues including the security fixes that come with Drupal 5.6 and others involving caching filtered content, menu item inheritance, missing breadcrumbs, better error reporting in the installer and updates, some translatability issues and lots of code style cleanups, and other small fixes. The most notable usability improvement since Drupal 6.0 RC1 is that the files directory is now automatically created in sites/default.

The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

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Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Download Drupal 5.6.
• Download Drupal 4.7.11.

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Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link, or listen to the latest Lullabot podcast about GHOP.

Since our last status report on December 13, 2007:

• An additional 12 students have taken on tasks from the Drupal project, bringing our total to 54 student participants.
• 11 new students have completed one or more tasks, bringing our total to 38, which means about 70% of our students have completed tasks. Of that number, 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest.
• There have been a total of 67 tasks completed so far, which is nearly double since the last report. The leaders in terms of raw task numbers are cwgordon7 (6) and Corsix (7), with Etinin (4) and ezyang (3) coming up behind.
• We have 97 available task slots remaining. The community created and offered to mentor 31 new tasks since the last status report, but we still need people to Propose new tasks and, perhaps more importantly, Review and refine existing task ideas.
• We also need help reviewing tasks promptly and throughly. Please keep your eyes on the list of GHOP issues, specifically those that need review. Note that we have a good mix of types of tasks (documentation, marketing, training, etc.), so non-coders can help as well.

There are fewer than 3 weeks left to propose tasks and fewer than 5 weeks left of the contest. Please help us get through this final stretch, folks!

Read on for a description of the tasks that have been completed since the last status update.

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The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA from March 3 - 6, 2008 in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

This Drupalcon represents two big advancements for Drupalcon.

• Larger capacity. The last two Drupalcon's have sold out, capped at 450 people. Depending on final arrangements we may be able to handle 700 at this event.
• Community expansion. Drupalcon is being held at the same time/place as AIIM International Exposition & Conference, the largest content management technology conference in North America. Though technically independent of each other, the Boston team is working to arrange some cross-event access. The goal: introduce Drupal to thousands of potential new Drupalers.

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