The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a U.S. nonprofit foundation dedicated to the news industry. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. The foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change.

The Knight News Challenge contest awards $5 million for innovative media ideas, however the October 15 application deadline is quickly approaching. The streamlined application takes less than 20 minutes. Anybody worldwide has a chance to win. For more information and to apply visit www.newschallenge.org.

Last year, Drupal contributors Benjamin Melançon and Lisa Williams were both awarded grants.

In particular, the Knight Foundation is looking for open source projects that improve local communities and have a news focus. The only restrictions for applying are outlined in their FAQ. Your proposal must be:

* Digital – Your idea uses digital technology (computers, the internet, cell phones, that sort of thing).
* Innovative – Your idea is new and original. It’s different from what people have done before. You are, in some way, breaking new ground.
* News/information – Your idea is about giving people access to what they want to know.

Drupalcon Barcelona 2007 was a totally awesome experience, a great venue, tons of stuff to do and people to see, and was clearly the biggest and best Drupalcon ever! :) However, unfortunately, only about 430 of us could come! :( So everyone who attended, please post a reply here to let us know what your thoughts/impressions were, a wrap-up of the sessions you attended, and anything else to help the folks who couldn't attend feel like they were there!

Also, please note that there is a section in the handbook for presentations and notes (or videos!) from any sessions you presented/attended: http://drupal.org/node/177855. Please help fill it out!

Also! There will be a Dojo session on Saturday, Sept. 29 for any Barcelona attendees to come and debrief the rest of the community on how it went. More info is available here: http://drupaldojo.com/lesson/30

With that said, I'll go ahead and start...

Yesterday the Adobe Flex team launched a Drupal powered application that showcases applications built with Adobe Flex. The new Flex Showcase is online now at http://flex.org/showcase_app.

The backend of the application uses Drupal, along with the Services, AMFPHP, Vote up / down and CCK modules. The front end of the application is written in Adobe Flex, with custom components written in Flash.

Drupal was chosen for the application because we needed a PHP framework that supported user registration and management, content management, categorization and tagging, and comments. Drupal was the best choice for these services, and with the work that Scott Nelson had already done with the Services and AMFPHP modules, the choice was easy.

Information is an independent daily distributed all over Denmark, Europe. It is issued six days a week with a circulation of 22.000 copies and has about 100.000 readers. Until recently the papers website, information.dk, was based on a home grown cms-solution. As of the 28th of August 2007 the website is running on Drupal. The design and CSS was done by Jens Christoffersen and the Drupal hacking was done by Johs. Wehner. The project was lead by Nikolai Thyssen, chief of new media.

After eight months of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first beta version of the Drupal 6.x family. This beta includes a tremendous number of new features and new programming APIs for both users and developers. We improved Drupal's human language related features, interoperability with databases, logging solutions, sign-on systems and also included an update notification module for improved security, so it becomes easier than ever to get up to date with the latest security and bug fixes.

It is important to note that this beta version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more beta version followed by at least one release candidate before Drupal 6.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this beta and providing feedback.