With an attendance of 80 to 90 people, and participants from all over the United States and even Ecuador, the first SANDcamp (San Diego Drupal Camp) was a success.

Hurrah!  With a new president comes a variety of changes, and with this president in particular, I'm sure we're in for plenty. 

A few reports have already been written about the "Fields in Core" coding sprint that was held December 15th - 19th at the Acquia offices in Andover, Massachusetts. While some of them are more technical, I decided to try to give you a good idea of what we spent our time doing. For the more technical ones check the "field in core" group.

Install profiles rock, and you should know what they are and why they’re the future.

WTH is an Install Profile?

There’s a folder you probably have paid little attention to that is situated right at the top level of a drupal install (5 or 6): profiles. The standard Drupal profile is called “default” and comes with any Drupal installation. Every time you’ve installed Drupal 5 or Drupal 6 (which probably borders the 1000s if you’re like me), you’ve run through the default install profile.

NAMM (the International Music Products Association) launched their WannaPlayMusic.com site this week, coinciding with Music Week, May 5th through the 9th.

Achieve's own Bill O'Connor (Drupal user csevb10) will participating as a mentor in this year's Drupal Summer of Code aggregator project. Bill has done substantial work on the Drupal Simplefeed module, working closely with Ted Serbinski (m3avrck) on a major overhaul in the summer of 2006 and the Drupal 6 upgrade earlier this year.

Drupal earns another feather in it's cap today with the announcement of the Webware 100 awards. The Drupal CMS is one of the nine finalists in the "Photos and Pubishing" category, selected by Webware and voted on by over two million Web 2.0 application users.

I have been working on upgrading the caching contrib modules to Drupal 6 and started to notice some patterns and duplicated code, which led me to think Drupal's approach to caching in general. We currently have a fairly limited API for caching, but we have a magic bullet that helps us overcome some of these weaknesses: the cache.inc override system. Anyone who has spent time on large production sites knows that one of the easiest ways to see better performance on your Drupal system is to use one of the existing cache mechanisms that I spoke about at Drupalcon Boston.

Achieve Internet is proud to have been an integral part of the development process for the new FastCompany.com business community site. We provided custom Drupal software development and project management leadership to deliver a world-class union of award winning journalism and online community. The site incorporates a professional grade content management system and editorial workflow controls, along with a full suite of cutting edge Web 2.0 applications.

I am very happy to announce the release of Memcache 1.7 for Drupal.  The most notable improvement being the addition of pluggable sessions for memcache.  Memcache is an instrumental module for scaling Drupal sites and we now have a release that is more stable than ever.