Another round of Drupal quickies for those who don't have the time to keep on top of all the recent happenings in Drupal land.

• Exactly two weeks from now, many of us will be at the Drupal Conference 2005 at FOSDEM'05. At the time of this writing more than 60 people subscribed so you better be there too, don't you think? Stefan, Drupal's professional photographer and long-time contributor, will be taking pictures for those who can't attend. Check the conference page for more information.
• Talking about conferences, Goba and the other members of the Hungarian Drupal team are organizing two Drupal related sessions at the Third Hungarian PHP Conference, held in Budapest on the 12th of March. One session will be about building an online shop with Drupal, and in the other session they'll compare Xaraya's and Drupal's APIs. The conference is free but they'll be selling Drupal t-shirts and mugs to help cover the conference costs.
• Ever since the last round of quickies in December, I implemented a Paypal donations tracker. If you haven't seen it already, you can check it out at http://drupal.org/donate/. People who donated money to Drupal are now listed publically. The next step is to show one's financial donations on his or her profile page, and to track expenses.
• Roland put on his superhero marketing outfit to make sure Rasmus Lerdorf, founder of PHP, knows about Drupal: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roland/3436941.
• Drupal had a brief mention in the January issue of Redhat Magazine. Take a look at http://www.redhat.com/magazine/003jan05/features/lamp/.
• Olen contributed an LDAP address book module which lets you manage your LDAP address book through Drupal. It strikes me as an interesting approach for those looking for basic contact management functionality. Especially because other tools (like your e-mail client) can automatically pick up your contacts. I wonder how this stacks with the contact directory module.
• Thanks to James, Drupal 4.6 will support the new rel="nofollow"-tag introduced by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! to combat comment spam.
• Make sure to check John's workflow module. In essence, the workflow module enables you to setup a publishing process. An example workflow with different workflow states would be: draft → text complete and spell checked → markup and illustrations added by designer → approved by editor → approved and published by boss. Thus, the workflow module allows the creation and assignment of arbitrary workflow states to content, and enables Drupal to perform certain actions (like sending an e-mail) when a post moves from one workflow state to another.
• Thanks to chx's SQL query rewrite work some Drupal pages are now up to 50% faster in absence of post-level permissions.
• On the usability front, we finally did away with the confusing forum configuration. Thanks to ccourtne and James, setting up a forum is now done using a dedicated user interface. It has never been easier to setup a forum with Drupal. Drupal 4.6 only.
• After the Finnish translation Drupal continues to conquer Scandinavia: Wulff contributed a Danish Drupal translation and steffen contributed a Norwegian Drupal translation. That makes for 26 translations in total.
• Chrisada added the Obsidian flavour for the Manji theme to Drupal's Manji port. See the theme in action at http://sandbox.ichris.ws/obsidian/ or download it here.
• Lo and behold: there is a Drupal 4.5.2 ebuild in Portage. It is still masked but Gentoo Linux users will love it nonetheless.