Angela Byron was announced as best contributor at the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame awards July 22nd, 2008. Please comment below if you've received help or have helped webchick help others as a way of demonstrating your congratulations.

Just a few years ago Angela Byron made the fateful decision to wander into #drupal and ask a question. Several years later, her helpful personality has tamed the #drupal developers and made the Drupal community more understanding and compassionate to its users and new developers.

Angela joined the Drupal project in 2005 as a Google Summer of Code student. If there is a way to contribute to Drupal, she does it:

Recruiting

She goes to various conferences and recruits people to join the Drupal community. Especially women. See
Speaking at Women in Open Source event in Los Angeles and women in open source on linux for slides examples and Google Podcast: Women in Open Source.

Documentation

Angie wrote the form API reference just to mention one of her bigger achievements. She is one of the best recruiters for the Drupal documentation team.

Secretary of the Drupal Association

Angie is the acting secretary of the Drupal Association, the non-profit organization responsible for overseeing the success of the Drupal project through raising funds, maintaining infrastructure, and running Drupal events.

GHOP and GSoC

She now leads the Drupal project in Google Highly Open Participation and Summer of Code events.

Coding

Her first patch was a huge one, revamping all our help texts. Subsequent code contributions to Drupal have included numerous extension modules, a theme, and significant core patches for Drupal 5, 6 and 7.

Patch reviewing

Angie is among the most active patch reviewers, meaning she interacts in a constructive way with most of the other people contributing to Drupal.

Training

As a part of her day job at Lullabot, she flys around the world delivering training to groups of people learning how to be Drupal developers and themers.

In the words of others:

Angie is a role model for everyone and an inspiration to work with. Her dedication to quality is contagious, and her passion for inclusion sets the standard for how people should work with each other.

- Robert Douglass, Senior Drupal Advisor, Acquia.

Angie has been a joy to work with, and I appreciate her dedication to the Drupal project. She makes Drupal shine.

-Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project, Drupal Association, Acquia

Summer 2008

As Drupal 6 matures, we are entering an exciting time for its users and developers. Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2 both have release candidates, and most of your favorite modules have either already been upgraded, or are well on their way. This summer has seen a lot of activity, such as the nearly 20 projects of the Google Summer of Code, and there are great things planned, such as the highly anticipated Drupalcon Szeged. We have seen two Drupal books published by Packt, with a third on the way, and Lullabot released the first DVD of their new Lullabot Learning Series.

Read on for a quick overview of the Drupal News and upcoming events!

In the last couple of weeks we received a lot of positive feedback on the usefulness of our consolidated registration system. People found it really easy that they didn't have to go contact receptionists to see in what hotels rooms were still available. On July 24th we are closing our accommodation service, so if you want to have us organize a hotel for you, you should register for the conference the coming week! You will still be able to see the hotel listing online, but you will have to organize everything yourself.

Drupalcon Szeged is again pulling a very international public. So far we have registered attendees from 35 countries. Hungary has a narrow lead with 43 participants, but is closely followed by the US with 40 and Germany with 35 registered participants. Next in line are Great-Britain, The Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden with 28, 20, 18 and 15 participants respectively (these statistics do not include people who didn't fill in their bio). There are 6 weeks left until the conference so there is still time to put a banner on your blog and get more people in your country to attend Drupalcon.

Packt has launched the third annual Open Source CMS Award today, giving fans of Drupal an opportunity to help them defend their title, which they won last year, collecting a first prize of $5,000.

The first stage of the Award is a call for nominations, which enables fans to nominate their favourite Open Source CMS. The five Content Management System's that receive the most nominations in each category will go through to the final stage of voting, which starts at the beginning of September, so your nomination counts!

To ensure that Drupal makes it through to the final voting stage, submit your nomination for Drupal here: www.PacktPub.com/article/nominate-overall-open-source-cms-winner/system/Drupal

Drupal is in the running as a finalist for the SourceForge 2008 Community awards in 5 categories. Voting ends on Friday.

1. Best project
2. Best project for Enterprise
3. Best project for Educators
4. Best Tool or Utility for Developers
5. Most Likely to Change the World