Today the Knight Foundation awarded $12 million in grants to various individuals and organizations to help journalism continue moving into a digital future. We're pleased to announce a couple of Drupal connections associated with this excellent initiative.
Benjamin Melançon, Co-founder of Agaric Design Collective, and Google Summer of Code student for Drupal this year, received $15,000 towards the development of a "Related Items" module for Drupal. The focus of this module will be on ease of use in connecting two pieces of content, including the ability to determine how to automatically forge connections between nodes. You can also read Benjamin's original proposal.
Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger and long time citizen journalist pioneer with her Boston local h2otown website, received $220,000 towards further developing Placeblogger. Placeblogger was developed using Drupal's built in aggregation ability, and customized to integrate geo and location information. The goal is to make it easier for people to find local news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of “universal geotagging” in blogs. Bryght worked with Lisa to help make this site a success. Find out more in Williams' announcement on Placeblogger.com.
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Since the previous status update, there have been a number of additional improvements, including:

Numerous installer improvements, including the ability to import translations for enabled modules automatically in the installer and the ability to specify numerous settings at install time (administrator (user number 1) credentials, clean URLs, timezone).
Automatically importing translation files for modules and themes, when installing modules or enabling themes, as well as when adding a new language.
Numerous usability improvements, including various installer improvements, the ability to remember anonymous comment posters, etc. It's great to see that the mega usability thread yielded some good patches.
The user status module and the HTML corrector module are now in core.
A vastly improved file management system, which associates files with users rather than nodes, so that files can be re-used among posts and various preview bugs are taken care of.
A completely reworked database abstraction layer for table creation. This makes it far easier to port Drupal to other database backends, such as Oracle and SQLite.
A JavaScript aggregator to complement the CSS aggregator feature in Drupal 5.
Right-to-left (RTL) CSS files for built-in modules, so themes supporting right-to-left displays can work easily with Drupal 6. RTL CSS support for some built-in themes is already done.

Due to the exciting developments in the past four weeks and the rapid pace that the developers are currently funneling in those improvements, I have decided to extend the code freeze until July 1, 2007. This way, the current waves of innovation won't be stifled, and it will help give us another four weeks to put in even more great improvements.
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Welcome to the June 2007 issue of the Drupal Newsletter! We've restructured how the newsletter is written, and moved everything to a much-more-public wiki at Drupal Groups, we hope you'll come over and contribute to the next issues :o). Elsewhere, the Drupal code freeze for version 6 has been delayed by 4 weeks, now at July 1st; developers everywhere have just started complaining about not having enough time, now they have to finish those patches!
Enough talk, the next issue of the Drupal Newsletter starts.......right now.
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Drupal has received one of the “Webware 100” awards for the Publishing category by CNET Webware. Other winners in this category include:

Wordpress
Google Analytics
FeedBurner
Blogger and
Adobe Flash

A quote from the official announcement:
Publishing had no mass consumer brands in the top 10, as most of the other categories did. WordPress got the most votes. I was interested to see the Drupal CMS platform placing high in this category--above the consumer-oriented publishing products Typepad and Vox. Even combined, these two Six Apart services didn't come close to winning the same number of votes as Drupal.
A complete list of all the competitors can be found on the webware.com site.
The finalists for the “Webware 100” awards were selected by the editors of Webware.com, a CNET site, but the ultimate winners were picked by the users. The “Webware 100” Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation.
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