Improving the usability of Drupal is very important. Yesterday, I wrote about the progress that was made on Drupal 7 usability -- the community has made a ton of incremental improvements, while Mark and Leisa have been preparing mockups and wireframes that provide significant over-arching improvements to Drupal's ease of use. Combined, I believe these efforts could make Drupal 7 a great release. A release that the Drupal project needs since our competitors are catching up in terms of functionality and flexibility. Likewise we need to catch up in terms of design and usability. It is my belief that we can develop a user experience for our project that is game changing, and that completely resets people's expectations both for Drupal and our competitors.

Almost 3 months have passed since Bonnie and her team performed the ultimate party trick: materializing a 1400 people conference out of thin air.

In the meantime many of you have been organizing camps, launching client projects, training new developers, contributing new modules and crafting beautiful designs. You have been extending core, writing tests, attacking patch queues, reshaping D7 and madly sprinting to keep ahead of the impending code freeze.

You are awesome. Really. You are what drives the DrupalCon Paris team. You make us want to put together a DrupalCon to remember. All the hours we spend selecting the right wine, cheese and pastries and the nights away from our families hand-picking the perfect hotel rooms and apartments... it's all for you.

Because we love you.

Come check out what we have in store for you. The new paris2009.drupalcon.org is ready to take your orders. Be quick: the early bird ticket price isn't going to last forever...

For those of you who want to become a sponsor and help make this DrupalCon happen: have a look at the sponsorship opportunities and don't hesitate to contact us.

The winners of the Horizon Interactive Awards were unveiled last week. In this eighth annual competition over 2000 sites were reviewed from 32 countries. The participants were judged on their creativity, user experience, and technical merit in media ranging from Web sites to DVDs. Several Drupal sites brought home awards, including those from Palantir.net, studio:module, and pingVision.

Drupal is a Webware 100 winner for the third year in a row. This year Drupal was in the Social & Publishing category with well known services including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress.com. Drupal was one of 10 winners in the category.

From CNET

The 2009 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 6,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, our editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users made the final cut, voting more than 600,000 times to select the 100 top products -- 10 each in 10 categories -- from our list of 300 finalists.

If you are a member of the Drupal community, you can add one of these badges to your Drupal site. A big thank-you goes out to all those supporters who voted for Drupal in the awards.

After winning control of the New York State Senate for the first time in almost 50 years, the Democratic party turned to Advomatic to quickly deploy a new website powered by Drupal. There were many challenges to be overcome, and their requirements pushed the envelope in some areas such as permissions and work flow. In the end, this site stands as a testament to what can be accomplished by a focused and experienced development team using the power and flexibility offered by Drupal and its community.