A few of us made it out to the OSCMS conference last month and are excited to share some exciting Drupal developments, learn what everyone is working on, and try out our own "Drupal lightening talks." This Wednesday's meetup will consist of a series of five minute brain dumps (kind of like speed dating) and beer. We'll meet around 7:00 pm at Cafe Luna at 1633 P Street NW. Michelle Balsley from Trellon came up with the new venue for this month - it should be bigger, which will be nice since we've grown a bit.

Anyone can present - the only two rules are that you must talk about Drupal and your presentation must be shorter than five minutes. Post your ideas here of what you want to present and what you're interested in hearing about. Hopefully we'll have about five or six different presentations. We'll start the presentations around 7:30 pm and then get back to just drinking around 8:00 pm. Post ideas on groups.drupal.org/node/3453

If you're in town for the NTC conference and want to join us, the bar is just a five minute walk from the Dupont Circle metro on the red line.

Last week, Jeff Robbins released a whimsical tune named The Drupal Song. It sticks in your ear and was the source of much fun and joking at the OSCMS Summit. Now Jeff has released all of the tracks for the song and is encouraging people to do The Drupal Song the open source way - by rolling your own. Take the tracks and mash them up to make your own crazy rendition. Most important, have fun!

If you gave a presentation at OSCMS (or attended one and took really good notes), please add a child page to OSCMS 2007 event page in the handbook with your stuff (slides, outline, etc.). Looks like several people have done this, but not everyone quite yet.

Thanks!

Following on a huge amount of discussion and planning at the Internationalization Group, Jose A. Reyero, Károly Négyesi (chx) and Gábor Hojtsy (myself) prepared a big patch to introduce better language support into Drupal 6.x-dev. We got significant code reviews and correction tips from Dries Buytaert, Steven Wittens and Doug Green. As a result, the development version of Drupal 6 now includes a generic language setup screen with support for right-to-left written scripts, native language names, path and domain based language selection and browser language detection. We also added support for language dependent path aliases, so you can have addresses like "example.com/espanol/contacto" and "example.com/english/contact", or alternatively "english.example.com/contact" and "espanol.example.com/contacto".

Although some of this functionality was available in contributed modules, such as i18n module and localizer module, we plan on making Drupal 6 the first release to include decent language support at the core level, of which this was the first significant step. We tried to test as many aspects of the changes as possible, but still we would welcome more testers for this particular feature, as well as opinions and contributions for new functionality implemented for Drupal 6.

Join us in the Internationalization Group and grab our code from our Subversion repository (information on the group homepage), or test the changes already included in Drupal 6.x-dev, by downloading the latest development tarball.

There's still time to be part of Google Summer of Code 2007! The deadline is Monday, March 26th at 5PM PDT. If you're a student, and you'd like to get your start in the community (or have already been around and would like to get paid for a new project you'd love to do :)), please apply!

We've had a number of great applications, but we would love to have even more! :) Summer of Code is a great way to get your start in Drupal's rich community of knowledgeable developers.

Some suggested proposal ideas are available from Proposed projects, including several high-profile and exciting projects such as the project quality metrics system; however, feel free to come up with your own nifty ideas, or flesh out one of the Proposal ideas.

Note to any students who aren't applying because they don't think they'll get accepted: You never know if you don't apply. ;) When I applied for Drupal, I had absolutely zero experience with the project... and look at me now. ;)

Apply today! :D