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DIWD speaker Brian Oberkirch caused me embarrassment and ultimately made me change my Twitter password.

Now don't get me wrong. Brian is a great guy. But with Twitterank gaining popularity and thousands of Twitter users (myself included) accepting the disclaimer "I'm not out to steal ur twitterz" as confidence enough to enter their Twitter passwords into a 3rd party site, he never should have joked that "Twitterrank is a vast conspiracy I created to steal all of your passwords and shame Twitter into OAuthing. And to make you look vain.". And Tantek Çelik should have never retweeted Brian's post prompting Oliver Marks to write an article on ZDNet entitled, "Gullible Twitter users hand over their usernames and passwords - did you get your Twitterank yet?!.

We're pleased to announce that O'Reilly's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, is now finished. It's being sent to the printer and should be available at your favorite book stores soon. In fact, you can pre-order from Amazon.com right now.

But you want a sample chapter, you say? Well you've come to the right place! The sample chapter is entitled "Event Mangement" and covers some of the most sticky aspects of handling time-based information in Drupal. The chapter talks about how to use the Date, Calendar, CCK, Views, and Flag modules to create a simple events site in which users can sign up to attend an event. The download includes the table of contents for the entire book, so you can see what you'll get when the entire book is ready.

Karen Stevenson joined the Drupal community in 2006. Within a year, she was a maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (better known as CCK), and author of both the Date and Calendar modules. With such amazing credits on her resume, you might expect Karen to be some hot shot kid with a crisp computer science degree in hand. But this is her second or third career depending on how you look at it.

Karen worked for 20 years as a certified public accountant and started her first website in 1994 as a hobby. She taught herself HTML and eventually starting the award-winning ElderWeb (http://www.elderweb.com), an immense directory of elder care information. The success of this site in the late '90s lead to many website development opportunities and Karen began to teach herself PHP. Over time she wrote several "home grown" content management systems (CMSes) before deciding "there must be a better way" and discovering Drupal.

These days, Karen does some work as a freelance Drupal developer, but she contributes an immense amount of time to improving CCK, Date, Calendar, and several other modules which she has authored. And she has been heavily involved in the efforts to move CCK into Drupal core.

For those unfamiliar with CCK, in it's simplest form, it allows administrators to customize the fields associated with a type of content. Add a job title field. Add a photo field. Add a department select list. And all of these fields become available to the rest of Drupal, so it becomes easy to float the photo to the right in each post and show a listing of everyone in the same department.

As for Date and Calendar, the short version is that these allow CCK and Views to handle event information. Add date/time information to content and sort it any way you like. Place categorized events on a calendar and subscribe with an iCal feed. If you've ever tried to build your own event management system you know how difficult it can be with virtual websites living across timezones and the international date line. Date and Calendar make event management (almost) easy.

We are honored to have Karen leading two sessions at The Do It With Drupal Seminar. On Thursday, she leads an overview session on The Content Construction Kit providing both an introduction and insight into advanced uses. On Friday, Karen will be talking about Date and Calendar and getting us set up for event success!

As usual, you can find these and all of the Do It With Drupal sessions on the schedule page.

Earl "merlinofchaos" Miles is the author of several amazing modules including Views, Panels, Nodequeue, and Advanced Help. He is responsible for major improvements to Drupal 6’s theming system and install system. And he was recently selected as Drupal's Most Valued Person 2008 by Packt Publishing.

It is no exaggeration to say that Earl single-handedly revolutionized the Drupal community when he released the Views module late in 2005. Views' ability to quickly create custom listings of just about anything in Drupal has opened up a new world for site admins.

We're pleased to have Earl joining us in New Orleans for The Do It With Drupal Seminar next month. On Thursday, he will be leading a session entitled Basic Views for those still trying to figure out the best ways to use Views on their sites and wrap their minds around the capabilities of this powerful module.

On Friday, Earl leads Advanced Views where we delve more deeply into Views tips and tricks and show some of the more advanced ways that Views can be used to organize and present content, users, and other types of information on any Drupal site.

Come learn Views from the man who wrote it. Check out the schedule for a complete look at the sessions being offered at Do It With Drupal.

Ubercart is a Drupal e-commerce solution that has quickly gathered a lot of buzz within the Drupal community over the past couple of years. The folks over at Top Notch Themes have eloquently listed the seven reasons why Ubercart has been the right e-commerce choice for them, and one of the most compelling ones is the community momentum behind the project.

There are a number of beautifully designed and robust stores that have been coming out such as Transformetrics Fitness Products, Fleurville Parenting Products, Rifftrax Digital Downloads, H. JLYNN jewelry, Mint Bags and Nutriprima Health Products.

Top Notch Themes even started selling custom themes for Ubercart, and wrote up a great handbook write-up for Creating an Online store with Drupal where they talk about how Ubercart leverages Drupal:

Unlike shopping cart-only systems, Drupal allows you to combine a fully functional community, business, or news website with your e-commerce. This adds powerful options for blogs, forums, social networking, custom displays of content, newsletters, and much more. These features can help your bottom line, as studies show the longer browsers stay on a site the more likely they are to purchase.

They also go on to talk about some other ways that Ubercart benefits from Drupal's power such as the Search Engine Optimization benefits, built-in taxonomy and user systems and the flexibility of other contributed modules such as CCK & Views, userpoints and fivestar ratings.

This community momentum is certainly one of the reasons why Lullabot chose to use Ubercart for the "Do It With Drupal" conference registration system. And we're definitely excited to have Ubercart's lead developer Ryan Szarma come down to New Orleans for DIWD to share more of his insights for how to best get up and running with Ubercart.

This is the last week for early bird discounts, and so register for the "Do It With Drupal" conference today!

Heya all DIWD-ers! The hotel has dropped the rate for rooms for the event by $10, to $149 per room. Anyone currently booked will get the new rate, but if you haven't booked your room already, be sure to do so before our block is fully booked.

In an article yesterday, 14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job, CNET offers this piece of advice (their top pick): get involved in an open source project.

In these uncertain economic times (who else is sick of hearing about that?), open source is a great bet. There will always be a demand for free software, and as such, there will always be a demand for the people that know how to use it.

Go Drupalers!

The last early-bird discount for The Do It With Drupal Seminar will be ending at the end of next week on November 1st. After that time, the registration price jumps up from $995 to $1195 for the 3-day learning conference.

If you're looking to save some money on the registration fee (and who doesn't want to save money?), we suggest that you register today.

Registration price includes attendance to all sessions as well as a catered breakfast and lunch at the Marriott for all 3 days of the event. Discounted rooms are available at the Marriott as well.

We are pleased to announce our latest affiliate sponsor for Do It With Drupal!

The Knight Foundation is working together with the Drupal community on the Knight Drupal Initiative to provide powerful tools for digital publication and encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information
and ideas.

Many Drupal projects are part of the Knight News Challenge, a yearly $5 million contest to find innovative digital information ideas. To help applicants strengthen their ideas, Knight built a Drupal site called the Garage that launched in September.

Knight will launch a new community site (built in Drupal) for discussion about information needs in November. Knight Foundation Online Community Manager Kristen Taylor is delighted to attend Do It With Drupal and answer questions about Knight's interest in Drupal.

Multimedia features in Drupal have long been a topic of interest. There are currently almost 200 modules available in the Media category on drupal.org and the topic has been covered in detail at nearly every Drupal conference since the the very first DrupalCon.

We are very pleased to have Aaron Winborn joining us at Do it With Drupal. In addition to maintaining several of the related modules, Aaron has recently completed writing the book on Drupal Multimedia for Packt.

Aaron has agreed to build a YouTube clone in Drupal to show us the power of the available modules. Check out some of his early thoughts about he project on his blog. Does your Drupal site need video? Come learn how to make it happen!