Not much dramatic has happened in the last few months. Mostly it's been editing and incremental adding, editing and updating pages with a few bonuses. To highlight some items seems a good idea. Please chime in as I'm sure I've missed some.

We've had the addition of various Video casts that people seem to enjoy. I would like to see more. I keep pretending that I'll have time to make some myself but so far that hasn't happened. Heine pointed out wink as a possible tool to generate some if anyone else was wanting to hop in and contribute. (You are of course welcome to use other tools, I just thought I'd mention it as free).

People have always been able to add pages to the handbook, they just went into moderation for a few days. Despite that, for our community our size, we still have a relatively small documenation contributor base but it is growing. Something that is very nice to see. A few weeks ago I chaged the default behavior of book pages and took all book submissions out of moderation. This has resulted in a bit more spam, test and garbage pages being visible in the handbook but so far has been under control. The other result is that you are able to edit your former contributions without knocking the page back into moderation.

We have also added an additional role on Drupal.org for more people to edit handbook pages without the additional responsibilities of being a site-maintainer. This will hopefully result in even better editing of content in the handbook and contribution. The barrier is that you need to join the documentation team list, express interest and ask.

While some more recipes have been added to the site recipes section (thanks everyone), tutorials that people had said they were working on have unfortunately not materialized. This is disappointing as several were very firm in various forum postings that this would happen. In any case, I and others would welcome tutorials and even video casts of those very same tutorials. Now is your chance to contribute. How to setup a local test site using XAMMP or ApacheTriad (someone could even grab the ones I started, update them and add them if they want) .... How to restore data to that site from your production site. Fame can be yours… :D

Another area or limbo is those folks who thought Drupal needed more Marketing. With the slow steady up take of Drupal by people and organizations I was never sure why but some folk were convinced we needed it. Unfortunately no one has really come up with any really comprehensive articles for the About Drupal marketing section so I may just re-order some of it myself.

In the Customization and themeing section the php snippets, theme snippets continue to grow. Heine went through and filtered out several that were not well written and contained various vulnerabilities. He contacted the authors and worked with them to update using more secure techniques to reduce and eliminate issue's. The Views snippets section was added earlier this year and is slowing growing more content.

Some work on cleaning up some of the Developers guide has been going on as various folks update example pages, add performance how-to's and try and reduce duplication of content. The PHPTemplate manual needs some attention in the near future though.

IBM Developer Works focused a nice series on setting up Drupal. If you haven't been following it, it's worth a read and will help introduce you to some areas beyond just Drupal that you may not have explored yet. IBM has some time limit restrictions but we should by able to add the content when those time limits run out. Have to check various licences and such.

So, what challenges lie ahead? The next release of Drupal is from an interface perspective dramatic. A lot of UI interface discussion happened between 4.4 and 4.5 and much of the results of those discussions have been filtering into Drupal core sense. Some have not proven to be a great way to go and others helped shine a light of solid ideas. The next version of Drupal will have a big impact on much of the existing Installation and configuration section of the handbook. The interface will change a bit, the CCK base api is now in core. The installer is in and this also affects module updates, etc. Jquery making it in (not in yet) will also have yet a further impact on the learning curve for Drupal users (and by users I mean those who implement sites, not your site's end-users)

What to do and how to approach this challenge is the next item up on the list with freeze in a few days....