Thanks to sponsorship from OpenBand (see Boris’ post on some of the other work we’ve done with OpenBand over the years), I will be heading off to Minneapolis during the second weekend in May (May 8-11) for what promises to be an intense, interesting, productive weekend. Robert Douglass has been hard at work in organizing the Drupal Search Design sprint that is taking place there. The goal of the sprint is to extend or redesign the Drupal search framework to support integrating engines such as SOLR, frameworks/strategies such as faceted search, distributed search and other services or agents involved in the production, consumption, or intermediation of information indexing and retrieval… in other words, everything imaginable to do with search.

The groups.drupal.org search group is an informative starting point for reading about many of the issues and new ideas that have emerged around indexing, search, and information retrieval in Drupal.

So far, it looks like the following are all confirmed:

• Aaron Stewart (Workhabit)
• Chad Fennell (University of Minessota)
• David Lesieur (UQAM)
• Djun Kim (RainCity Studios)
• Doug Green (CivicActions)
• Earnest Berry III (Workhabit)
• Michael Hess (Universtiy of Michigan)
• Robert Douglass (Acquia)

W00t!

Interestingly, my last visit to Minneapolis was to attend a conference on System Administration sponsored by the pioneering Geometry Centre at the U. Minn.
And one of the big topics we discussed there was search.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

Conferences, barcamps galore abound in this city, sign up quickly for the Open Web Vancouver conference, including:

2 jam packed days of technology talks

• keynotes: Tim Bray on the future face of the web and Zak Greant on Visionary look at open source
• Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis by Duane Nickull
• some of my favourite PHP speakers; Damien Seguy on Security for Web applications and Derick Rethans on EZ component Library and Test Driven Development
• a speaker from Mozilla: Laura Thomson on Robust and Maintainable code
• OpenStreet Map by Corey Burger from Ubuntu
• OpenRIA with Jeff Griffiths
• Frameworks: cakephp, drupal, merb, django, Djun Kim with Metrics for understanding frameworks
• Nathan Yergler on semantic web and creative commons licensing, microformats with Ryan King, Microformats (+DiSo) with Chris Messina
• visionaries and activists: Darren Barefoot 1100 stacies, Joe Bowser on Technology Behind FreeTheNet, Irwin Oostindie on Re-routing the Digital Divide with Mobile, Roland Tanglao on Grassroots Open Mobile Technology, Kate Milberry on Open Source and Social change
• Many more, including Google Gears, Brian Shire on OpenSocial, Eric Promislow Scaling Javascript, Paul Reinheimer Ajax applications

OpenSocial/Facebook Camp

• Sign up for lightning talks, read more on Social Camp
• Gerald Bauer will talk on developing social web applications using Ruby on Rails
• Boris Mann on Social Graph enabling every website

Mozilla/XUL Camp

MozCamp organized by Shane Caraveo of Activestate, local guru extraodinare.

Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement.

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