On Wednesday, January 18, 2006 18:00GMT (noon eastern time US, 9am US West Coast Time, 7pm central european time), the Drupal community is invited to a Bug Fixing party. Even if you can't attend at that time, you can still help out. Click 'read more' for details.

Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3 was released yesterday. Our party is coordinated via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Meet fellow Drupalites in the room entitled #drupal-bugfix on the server chat.freenode.net. If you are unfamilar with IRC, you will need to download an IRC client application to your PC. You will need to have downloaded and installed version Drupal 4.7.0 beta 3.

Drupal 4.7 beta 3 release announcement and download link is here.http://drupal.org/drupal-4.7.0-beta3

You may help in several ways:
(1) Review outstanding bugs. Assure that they are clearly described and are valid as opposed to a misunderstanding on the part of the bug author. If you have installed and/or administered a Drupal site, you can be of great help at this task.

(2) Post follow-ups to outstanding issues clarifying the problem, or stating that the problem is not a software bug, but rather a user misunderstanding. Close duplicate bugs as needed.

(3) Reproduce outstanding bugs. If you can install and administer a Drupal site, you can help replicate problems reported and not yet verified. Your verification plus any additional details you provide will help immensely in quickly locating and fixing the bug. Post follow-ups to the issue indicating that you were able to duplicate the bug, and what your test environment was (operating system, installed modules, browsers, etc. as appropriate) when you duplicated it.

(4) Fix bugs. If you are a developer, look over the outstanding issues list and find some bugs to squash.

(5) Review patches. If you are a developer, monitor the patch queue and assure that the attachments there fix the reported bug and don't cause unwanted side effects.

We will all be together in IRC to help each other out, as well.

After the last bugfix party, Moshe put out a call for volunteers to help organize another party, (http://drupal.org/node/41320#comment-76860) so I volunteered.

Thanks very much to all the developers and contributors for putting together a really terrific CMS. Hope you can come to the bug fix party next Wed.

ae2005