Drupalers --- Community of Persian (Farsi) Drupal Developers ---

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/general_sciences/Eureka_Science_News_just_launched';

Eureka! Science News just launched – it is a site dedicated to provide the very latest science news, but with a special twist – it is entirely automated! There is no human editor behind it - it finds relationships between news stories from all major science sites and regroups, categorizes, ranks, tags, finds related press releases and publishes them directly on the site. The result is an efficient overview of everything happening in science, right when it happens. The following details how we built the site.

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Developing new modules for Drupal 6? Porting older modules? Packt Publishing has just released a new book, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, by Matt Butcher. This book is targeted toward PHP programmers interested in Drupal 6 module development.

The book takes a hands-on approach. Each chapter walks through the development of a module, theme, or installation profile. As the reader progresses through the book, she or he will be able to create increasingly sophisticated Drupal modules.

If you're new to Drupal development (but have PHP development experience), this book will get you developing modules right away. Are you a more seasoned Drupal developer just looking to get some modules updated? This book focuses on many of the new features, changes, and improvements made in Drupal 6. Check out the sample chapter Creating Our First Module (1.3M PDF) to get a feel for how the book is written.

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Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is Packt's new book, written by Michael Peacock, aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. With more and more websites aiming to integrate all of their components to give a more slick and streamlined effect for users - by using Drupal e-Commerce, the site and the store are already integrated providing both a powerful website and a powerful online store.

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The Horizon Interactive Awards winners were announced over the past weekend. Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Several Drupal-powered sites, developed by studio:module and pingVision were among the winners.

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Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, CNET's editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users decided the final cut, voting nearly two million times to select the 100 top products--10 each in of 10 categories--from our list of 300 finalists. We hope that the Drupal community is excited about being selected by your users. And we congratulate the Drupal community on offering a great Web service.

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We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 21 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2008. We'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Google, who are making more than a $100,000 investment in the Drupal project.

This year particularly, there were many more projects that we would've liked to accept than we were able to (probably due at least in part to changes Drupal made to its SoC application process this year). The mentoring team deliberated fiercely over the past two weeks, and arrived at the final acceptance list detailed in the "read more" link.

Many of the projects this year build on work done during previous Summer of Codes. Drupal core will benefit from a new aggregator, improved search scoring, OpenID attribute exchange, revamped help system and color module, SimpleTest security scanner and generalized Validation API. There are also projects focused on improvements to the Drupal.org infrastructure, including ApacheSolr search, version control API, and the much demanded plugin manager for secure, automated updating of module and themes.

Some of Drupal's major contributed modules will also gain, including Views as widgets, Views RDF/XML/JSON output, Views & CCK chart support, extensions to Nodequeue and OAuth support for Services.

There's also a healthy component of brand new functionality, including an image manipulation GUI, memetracker, bookings API, Icon module, document import module and Usability testing suite.

If you'd like to keep up on Summer of Code happenings, would like to volunteer to help test students' projects, and/or would like to help students as they find their way in our community, please join the SoC 2008 working group and help out in whatever ways you can. Also check out Planet SoC to read blog entries from Summer of Code students across all mentoring organizations.

Here's to another great summer! :) Read on to find more details about Drupal's accepted proposals.

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The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.
--Dries Buytaert, in Businessweek

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Also among the top innovators are Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, Joe Green of Causes, Drew Houston of Dropbox, David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, and others.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

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Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

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Szeged city view from the Tisza river

At this year's Drupalcon we're turning Szeged, Hungary into Drupaltown!

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Szeged, Hungary from August 27 to 30, 2008 in the Library and Conference Center of the Szeged University. With a thousand Drupal enthusiasts expected we'll be turning this picturesque student city into a true Drupaltown!

Drupalcon has been a major success for the Drupal community, with every conference reaching out to more and more people. Like Boston, Drupalcon Szeged will again provide ample opportunities both for business people, developers, themers, designers, and users in the community: there will be a code sprint, plenty of space for BOF sessions, a job fair and, of course, plenty of opportunity for networking. Start planning, buy your tickets early and be prepared to meet your Drupal community in Szeged, Hungary; Drupaltown!

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Given the success of David Mercer's first Drupal title for beginners, Packt has published a new and improved edition to go with the latest release of Drupal. The new book, still targetted at beginners and intermediates, builds on its predecessor to provide a steeper launching ramp for everyone who still feels they're not yet a pro.

Changes to the new version include:

• Slimmed down writing, to provide faster flowing and more concentrated information
• Updates to all the original text to reflect the enhanced features of D6
• Vastly expanded the range of topics
• Increased the depth and level of coverage for many topics

Despite the fact that I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained, the new version is over 330 pages. This gives you an idea of how much new material went into this edition in order to bring it up to speed with this most impressive of Drupal releases. This new book is as much an overhaul of the last as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

I hope that this title will meet the following goals that I have personally set for it:

1. To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club

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Spirit Library is library of spiritual messages and information. It contains thousands of articles/messages from spiritual speakers and authors which are filterable and sortable in different ways. The site extensively uses the excellent Panels 2 modules alongside Views.

This is the third incarnation of the site, and the one that finally gets very close to where we wanted to be with it. The first version was launched 18 months ago as a Plone site, as that was the CMS i had most experience with, but after a while it became too restrictive and we started looking in Drupals direction. For the second version we migrated the site from Plone, and the change coincided with a large jump in traffic and at the same time gave the vps it was hosted on more room as it used less server resources (especially memory).

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Myplay.com is a redesign and re-branding of Sony's Musicbox site which showcases SonyBMG's artists, providing free access to their videos, music and photos. Users can create lists of their favorite artists as well as review their music and embed widgets of their favorite artist's content into other sites. Sony Musicbox was originally implemented by the Lullabots who provided the base framework for this redesign. Thanks to their diligence and teaching as well as excellent tools provided by Earl Miles (Panels 2, Views and Nodequeue), three people (Suzi Arnold, Jerad Bitner and David Burns) were able to accomplish this task in just over a month.

This case study documents how the site is put together, and provides implementation details on how we've combined numerous important contributed modules to build a "next generation" Drupal site.

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After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

If you're interested in learning more about how Mollom works, check out the 'How Mollom works' page and visit the Mollom FAQs for more details.

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