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JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.

When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.

At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.

The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.

We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.

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Drupal 6.13 and 5.19, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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Mediacurrent collaborated with InterMedia Outdoors, Inc. to redesign their family of interactive websites using the Drupal content management system as a foundation. This required the migration and restructuring of content from several websites hosted by a legacy content management system (CMS.) The result was a fresh, modern web design and a social network that allowed Intermedia’s users to access a vast repository of content quickly and easily. This case study focuses on www.in-fisherman.com, the first website Mediacurrent developed for InterMedia Outdoors, Inc.

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I'm looking at a fresh new copy of Drupal 5 Views Recipes. I wrote it, and I'm thrilled to see it in print.

I have a mix of Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 sites out there. If you've got any Drupal 5 sites, consider this book.

I'll start by mentioning the appendices, since I think that's one of the most information-rich sections of the book. (The rest of the book consists of 94 step-by-step recipes.)

Appendix A – List of all default views available for Drupal 5
Appendix B – Comprehensive list of Drupal 5 field formatters, by module
Appendix C – Comprehensive list of Drupal 5 style plugins, by module
Appendix D – Views 1 hooks
Appendix E – Modules included in recipe ingredients
Appendix F – Additional resources and modules
Appendix G – Selected noteworthy patches to Views, sorted by topic

Appendix E can serve as an index to the recipes, and also includes a column indicating which modules are available for Drupal 6. Appendix G unlocks a whole host of functionality not available in Views 1 by default.

Recipes

Interesting content includes:
- How to overcome the case of the missing term in taxonomy views
- Views arguments
- Proximity search (Find every trailhead within 6 miles of a Senior Center, for instance)

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For the last few months myself and quite a few community members have been working on a larger vision for our beloved Drupal documentation. It has taken quite a bit longer than I had hoped, but I want to put out a draft of an initial "roadmap" for documentation that outlines our bigger issues and an approach to tackling them. I've attached a document which has everything we've hammered out so far in a 10 page document along with three appendices. This post is just a short summary of what is in that document and to let people know that we are gearing up to kick things off and really make Drupal documentation rock.

For starters, we've spent a lot of time identifying problem areas, prioritizing them and setting out some target dates. When looking at the tasks we need to accomplish we recognized that there are two main areas to focus on: the documentation itself and the community of people that create and maintain it.

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At DrupalCon DC 2009, an unexpected event happened. While sessions centered on development, writing code, performance, businesses and the community were happening up front, the community of Drupal designers and themers were connecting behind the scenes like never before. It started over Twitter and in small Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and ended with the designers and themers taking over a room for the last two days of DrupalCon.

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Packt Publishing is pleased to announce the release of a new Drupal book called Flash with Drupal, authored by Travis Tidwell. Catered for Drupal Developers, this book walks the reader through the evolution of many different Flash applications built around the power and flexibility of Drupal.

Packt Publishing is also pleased to offer a 15% discount to any Drupal.org user. To purchase this book with this discount, simply purchase Flash with Drupal through Packt Publishing, and provide the code FlashDru15. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

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Packt Publishing is celebrating its fifth year in existence by crowning an author of the year for 2009. All authors releasing a book through Packt in 2008 were eligible for this distinction. Voting was opened to the public and through this process the field was whittled down to six finalists.

The competition has served as a reflection of the quality work being done within the Drupal community. Of the 81 titles under consideration, covering a wide range of IT disciplines, two of the final six authors wrote books on Drupal. Aaron Winborn was recognized for his book "Drupal Multimedia" and Matt Butcher for "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development". The vote will now go to a panel of experts who will determine the winner based the quality of the author's work and its contribution to the tech community.