EDIT: Comments on this post are now locked. Some jackhole came onto MY blog and insulted my wife. I cannot be fair, impartial or unbiased about that.

Full disclosure: I am a former Permanent Member of the Drupal Association. While I am no longer associated with the organization, I do have reasonably good knowledge of its inner workings and maintain contact with many people within the structure.

As of Jul 5, I've decided to try my luck on the open market, and am going freelance. I formed Logrus, Inc awhile back, and given the market right now, I feel like I can do pretty well as an independent provider. I have a very notable profile, I think.

I'm not severing my relationship with iO1 entirely; I'm staying on board as a contractor and will help them out, but my time is no longer exclusively theirs. Starting Jul 5, I will be available for the following types of tasks:

So I finally had a reason to upgrade Angry Donuts. Namely that Drupal 5 was holding me back from upgrading my webserver to PHP 5.3. So this is now running Drupal 7. Upgrading the theme was a pain in the buttocks, but everything else went smoothly, since I have almost no custom code here.

As a followup to yesterday's article about the new UI, this is a call for contributors.

Specifically:

1. We could use someone versed in CSS to help make the new UI look acceptable in Bartik and additionally it'd be nice if the 'base' version was at least usable in Stark. We're using a system where we can bring in stylesheets for specific things, so what we really want to do is provide some kind of basis for theme developers so that they can help tune the Views UI to their theme if they expect people to do administration in it.
   

Due to my prominence in the community, I get fairly regular contacts from people who need services. This is to be expected. Due to the volume of these contacts, I have gone out of my way to be difficult to contact directly. I don't have the patience for people directly emailing me with questions about my projects or my book or thinking that somehow I'm going to be cheap labour for their complicated problem.

Amazon (and presumably the rest of the book-selling world) now has Drupal's Building Blocks on sale!

To celebrate managing to actually get this book to press, I'll be giving away four signed copies.

The book ended up being long overdue because, mostly, I couldn't manage to prioritize it up enough to get it done.

It took Emma Jane Hogbin to step in and finish a few bits and polish it a little to get this book to actually go to press. It should be printed right before Christmas and will spend a couple of weeks in transit. Amazon says Jan 10, which is probably about right.

Last week, esmerel and I wrote up the handbook for the Views' Bug Squad, and we did a bit of a soft launch, only immediately telling people on IRC. This turned out to be a good thing, because a bug on drupal.org prevented us from actually getting it going, and all of the drupal.org maintainers who could fix the bug were, unsurprisingly, busy on the redesign.

Heather James pointed me at drupal.org instructions on performing triage in various queues. Naturally, that article focuses on the Views queue, because it is one of the 5 most difficult queues to manage on drupal.org. (To my surprise, GMap ended up being in that list as well.) The things it focuses on are relatively easy tasks, with some suggestions.

Those who have been concerned that there would be no Panels for Drupal 7 can rest a little easier. Today I made alpha releases for both Panels and the Chaos Tool Suite. There's still a few bugs, and there's still a bunch of work left to do, but we're to the point where it seems to be at least basically usable.

Sep 13-15, 8 of us met at the Commerce Guys facility in San Francisco for a 3 day code sprint:

• Me! (Hi there)
• Sam Boyer
• James Gilliland
• Kris Vanderwater
• Jen Lampton
• Jon Skulski