Community Input Sought for DrupalCon North America 2013

One of the main activities of the Drupal Association (aside from keeping the lights on here at drupal.org) is to produce each DrupalCon, an international event that brings together the people who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. Every DrupalCon features dozens of curated sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond, as well as countless opportunities for networking, code sprints, informal conversations, and more.

While we’re very excited about the upcoming DrupalCons in London in August (do you have your tickets yet?) and Denver next March, we’re already thinking ahead about where the 2013 North American DrupalCon should be. And, we’d like your help!

Please take the straw poll to tell us where you would (and would not) like DrupalCon to be held:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/drupalconpoll

Or, if you’re part of a team that would like to get more involved and organize a DrupalCon in a specific location, please submit your team’s interest via our nomination form on the Association site.

Surveys and nominations will be accepted through 11:59pm Hawaiian Time (UTC/GMT -10 hours) on June 19, 2011.

For more information, the Association’s Web site has the 2013 DrupalCon North American Selection Committee and the selection process. Thanks!

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com 

Source:  http://drupal.org

HTML5 in Drupal 8

HTML5 is about to rock our world. There are books written about why that is the case, but simply put, it can provide a much better user experience on both desktop and mobile devices, and could lead to a convergence between native applications and the mobile web.

I believe in HTML5 enough that I wanted to make it one of the top 5 initiatives for Drupal 8; and switch Drupal's default doctype from XHTML to HTML5. This is the fifth official Drupal 8 initiative after the Configuration Management, Design, Web Services and Multilingual initiatives.

I have asked Jacine Luisi to be the Initiative Owner for the Drupal 8 HTML5 Initiative. Jacine is a prolific themer and contributor known to be a markup/CSS nut. I'd also like to recognize Jen Simmons for all her evangelism work on HTML5 in Drupal. I hope that work continues as it can feed into the HTML5 Core Initiative.

The way we'll approach this initiative is by starting off with some of the low-hanging fruit, and gradually work our way up to more advanced parts of the specification. In her announcement blog post, Jacine provides a plan for what that means.

To keep track of what is going on, tune into the core issue queue on issues tagged HTML5 or participate in the HTML5 group. Details will be posted shortly on the core initiative homepage.

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com 
Source: http://buytaert.net/  

IKEA using Drupal

IKEA is everywhere. With over 300 megastores in dozens of countries, it's one of the world's most recognizable brands. Chances are you have some IKEA furniture in your home -- I certainly do.

With the help of Swedish Drupal consultancy NodeOne and the ad agency Futurniture, one of the company's websites, http://livethemma.ikea.se/play, is now on Drupal. This video-rich site makes heavy use of Apache Solr and Panels Everywhere; the theme is based on Precision, while Varnish and Memcached speeds everything up.

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com 
Source: http://buytaert.net/ 

Fast-tracking Drupal 7 bug fixes

The Drupal project has a policy of fixing bugs in the development release (currently, Drupal 8) and then backporting to stable releases (currently, Drupal 7 and Drupal 6). This policy is important, because it helps to prevent regressions from being introduced in future versions of Drupal.

However, the size of our project and our community has reached the point where a single maintainer of the development release (currently, me) doesn't scale at times. I've been very focused on setting the vision for Drupal and launching the Drupal 8 initiative. As a result, we have a growing backlog of bug reports that needs to be looked at and that is holding back the stabilization process of Drupal 7.

To fix this, I am going to be granting Angela "webchick" Byron, my Drupal 7 co-maintainer, commit rights for bug fixes in Drupal 8, in order to help ease maintenance of Drupal 7 and speed along the stabilization process.

This is something that a number of prominent core developers have been asking for, and will allow me to keep my focus on setting the strategic direction for Drupal 8, appointing and working with Drupal 8 core initiative owners, and prioritizing incorporation of new features. The goal is to help Drupal to scale, and to increase the momentum of core development for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com 
Source: http://buytaert.net/