As the Drupal community has grown the rate of forum and mailing list traffic has increased, making it difficult keep on top of all the recent developments in Drupal land. In an attempt to address this problem, I wrote a status report about the ongoing work. Read on.

In no particular order:

• Our Paypal button generated about 350 euro since it has been installed. Thanks for the support. We are looking into adding a 'Paypal tracker' so both donations and expenses can be tracked at drupal.org.
• I plan to release a first Drupal 4.5 bug fix release, Drupal 4.5.1, by December 1th. So far we fixed quite a few glitches, yet no critical bugs have been identified. Keep reporting and fixing bugs so we can get the best out of Drupal 4.5.1.
• Read what Dan Gilmor, a well-known technology columnist has to say on using Drupal.
• Steven Wittens rewrote Drupal's search module. Last year, Steven predicted that "to improve Drupal's search procedure, a magic gnome will pop-up who is an expert in this area and has fallen in love with Drupal" and that despite the gnome's patch being rejected time after time, he'd keep working on it "due to some weird sense of masochism". Did he know he'd be calling himself a gnome. Either way, the new search module which will be part of Drupal 4.6 has been humming along on Drupal.org for a couple weeks. Conclusion: it is easier to use, looks better and it yields much better search results. On a related note, Tommy Sundstrom has written a handy Firefox plugin to search drupal.org with Google. Worth installing if you are a Firefox user.
• James Walker has written a new image module which might become a replacement for the existing image module. Take a look at his sandbox if you want to help test or evaluate his image module. Rumors have it James also registered drupal-world-domination.com. Not sure what he has been thinking but maybe there is a hidden relationship.
• The University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) in Canada rolled out a big Drupal project: anyone with an UPEI e-mail addresss (students, instructors, and administrators) is iligible for a free Drupal weblog. More about this on the weblogs@UPEI website.
• Neil Drumm made significant user interface improvements to the block administration which will be released in Drupal 4.6. The custom and path columns have been moved to a configuration page for each block and became a lot more intuitive to use.
• Bryght reports that Cam Barrett, a weblog pioneer, uses Drupal to power PersonalDemocracy.com. Hi Cam, I have been reading your weblog since 2000.
• The CivicSpace distribution is now powering over 100 grassroots community sites and counting. Work has begun on a contact management framework that will bring CRM (client relationship management) functionality to the Drupal platform that will let organizations track contact, donation, and participation information.
• Thanks to Kjartan Mannes, drupal.org moved to a new server and host. We now have a Pentium 4 Xeon 3Ghz, no less.
• With the advent of the improved locale module in Drupal 4.5.0 and Gerhard's helping hand, the Drupal translation projects got a serious boost. A dozen new translation maintainers have been granted CVS accounts and Drupal is already being translated to more than 15 languages. Translating requires no programming experience, so this is an excellent opportunity to contribute to Drupal if you don't have PHP experience.
• We are witnessing an outbreak of country specific Drupal communities: the Italian Drupal site, the Hungarian Drupal site, the Japanese Drupal site, the Russian Drupal site, etc. How to integrate and support these initiatives?
• On a related note, effort is put in the development of a new i18n module to enable multi-lingual content (the locale module allows you to translate the interface but not your site's content). I haven't tried the module yet but Jose A Reyero has been soliciting feedback on the developers mailing list. Background information can be found at http://drupal.org/node/11051.
• I created an extension to the translator's guide. On this page you can check the progress made on each translation of Drupal's interface into a variety of languages. To get your language listed, read the translator's guide and start to translate right away.
• Talk is silver, contributions are gold.