Voting is now open for the 2012 election of at large directors of the Drupal Association. Two directors will be elected from among the ten candidates.
About the Drupal Association electionsWhen we designed a new governance structure for the Drupal Association last year, we decided that most of the board is selected through a nominating committee with the goal to carefully balance many factors like needed skills and geographical and sector representation. However, it was also deemed important that we have directors chosen directly by the Drupal community to make sure that the community is always well-represented.
We're holding our first open community elections! Two community "at large" directors will be elected to the Drupal Association Board of Directors, and YOU can get to say who they are!
Where to find out about candidatesVoting is open to all individuals who registered an account on drupal.org prior to January 18, 2012 and who have logged into that account at least once in the one-year period prior to February 3, 2012.
There is no need to register to vote. The voting system has been set up and prepopulated with the list of eligible voters.
How to voteThe voting is done using the "Instant Runoff" voting method, powered by Decisions module. For more about this method of voting, please see this helpful YouTube video which explains it with post-it notes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA3_t-08Vr0
Can I change my mind after I've voted?Yes! Before the close of voting, you can return to the voting form, cancel your previous vote, and submit a new vote.
When will voting close?Tuesday, February 7, 2012 is the last day of voting. Voting will close at 00:00 UTC on Wednesday, February 8, 2012.
How will results be determined and announced?When voting closes, a four-member elections team will review the results and post them to this site (association.drupal.org). Results will then be forwarded to the Drupal Association board for ratification.
The election team includes Angela Byron, DA board member; Cary Gordon, DA board member; Nedjo Rogers, DA advisory board member; and Thomas Svenson, Drupal community member who participated in the community process of planning the elections.
Why was voting delayed?We had focused a bit too much on organizing the elections and left finalizing the actual voting system till the last minute. After several community members and Drupal Association staff pitched in, we got the elections system up about 3 hours after the planned opening of voting.
Wait. Only XXX eligible voters? What gives?Despite the fact that the voting form lists far fewer, there are actually 270K Drupal.org accounts that fit the voter eligibility criteria. Valid accounts are added to the electorate list when they visit the Association website. These shenanigans are due to the Bakery module, our single-sign on solution, and the requirement to reconcile peoples' Association.drupal.org user IDs and their Drupal.org user IDs.
Problems and solutionsIf you believe you are eligible to vote and try to vote and cannot or encounter some error, please post an issue to the Drupal Association issue queue, selecting "elections" as the component.
More about the electionsDrupal 7.11 and 6.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.
Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 also fix other issues reported through the bug tracking system.
Download Drupal 7.12Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.
Security informationWe have a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories, and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.
Drupal 7 and 6 include the built-in Update status module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.
Bug reportsBoth Drupal 7.x and 6.x branches are being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.
ChangelogDrupal 7.11 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 7.12 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.10 and 7.12 releases can be found by reading the 7.12 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.
Drupal 6.23 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 6.24 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 6.22 and 6.24 releases can be found by reading the 6.24 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 6.x branch can be found at git commit log.
Security vulnerabilitiesDrupal 7.11 and 6.23 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:
To fix the security problem, please upgrade Drupal.
What is included with each release?We made two versions of both Drupal 7 and 6 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 respectively) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.12 and 6.24). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.
Update notesThe default.settings.php file was changed in Drupal 7.12, to add documentation about PDO attribute override capabilities that were added as a result of #1309278: Make PDO connection options configurable.
The robots.txt file was changed in Drupal 6.24 to block filter tips from search engines. The .htaccess and (default.)settings.php files were not changed in Drupal 6. Additionally, indexes were added to the node_comment_statistics and comment tables, for performance.
Known issues # Drupal 7The Drupal 7.11 release is only an incremental release off of Drupal 7.9, instead of 7.10, so it is missing bug fixes introduced in 7.10. Discussion is ongoing at #1430404: Drupal 7.11 is missing all the bug fixes from Drupal 7.10.
Drupal 7.12 is also only compatible with Menu Block 7.x-2.3 and higher, and Internationalization (i18n) 7.x-1.4 and higher.
Drupal 6In Drupal 6.24, if you have the contributed user_delete module enabled on your site, the update will fail with a Cannot redeclare user_delete_access() error. An update of user_delete module is being worked on.
In Drupal 6.24 if you had locale module enabled earlier, but it is not currently turned on, the update will fail with Call to undefined function locale_inc_callback(). A fix is being worked on for Drupal core.
In Drupal 6.24 if you run your updates with Drush, you might experience duplicate entry errors in your system table. See the ongoing discussion at http://drupal.org/node/1425868
Elections for at large Drupal Association elections are kicking into high gear with two all candidates meetings this week before voting opens Friday.
Election candidates will participate in all candidates meetings are scheduled over the next two days (Wed., Thurs. or Fri., depending on your location). The first meeting, intended to work for people in the Asia and the Pacific, is scheduled for 01:00 UTC on Thursday. That's 5 PM PST on Wednesday for those in the US and Canada.
The second all candidates meeting at 17:00 UTC Thursday is timed for participants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Then on Friday voting will open. Details on voting will be posted to association.drupal.org.
See the elections announcement for more on how to learn about the candidates.
We are announcing a Joomla! Pizza Bugs and Fun event scheduled for Saturday, March 3, 2012. The event is global for virtual participants with local venues where ever they are organized. We squashed a lot of bugs last month, but as more people use a new release, we always find more. We'll also have documentation ready to be worked on.
We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action.
meet·up \mēt-əp\ noun
A meeting, especially a regular meeting of people who share a particular interest and have connected with each other through a social-networking Web site: a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood; a meetup to plan the trip; a meetup for WordPress users.1
So what is a WordPress Meetup? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be bloggers, business users, developers, consultants, or any other category of person able to say, “I use WordPress in some way and I like it, and I want to meet other people who can say the same.” Meetups come in different shapes and sizes, but they all carry the benefit of connecting you with potential collaborators and friends, and helping you learn more about what you can do with WordPress. Here are some of the common types of WordPress meetups:
There’s no prescribed format, as each local group can decide for itself what they want to do. Some groups mix it up from month to month, while others have multiple events each month to satisfy the needs of their community.
The tough part? Running a popular group takes time and money. Just as we worked last year to remove the financial burden for WordCamp organizers and provide logistical support so they could focus more on their event content and experience, we want to start extending that kind of support to meetup groups as well. We don’t want it to cost anything for someone to run a WordPress meetup, or to attend one — building local communities should be as free as WordPress itself!
Since there are so many more meetups than there are WordCamps, we’re going to start with the cost that is the same for every group: meetup.com organizer dues. We’re setting up an official WordPress account on Meetup.com right now, and over the next couple of weeks will be working with existing meetup group organizers, people who want to start a new meetup group, and the helpful folks at Meetup.com to put this program in place. WordPress meetup groups that choose to have their group become part of the WordPress account will no longer pay organizer dues for that group, as the WordPress Foundation will be footing the bill.
This is exciting for several reasons. First, it means local organizers who are giving something back to the project by way of their time won’t also have shell out $12-19/month for the privilege. That alone is a big step. Second, it will open the door to more events and leaders within a community, since leadership and event planning won’t need to be tied to “owning” the meetup group. Third, more active meetup groups means more WordCamps, yay!
In addition to the financial aspects, we’ll be working on ways to improve social recognition of meetup activity by incorporating feeds from the official meetup groups into the WordPress.org site, and including meetup group participation in the activity stream on your WordPress.org profile.2 I’m also hoping we can do something around providing video equipment to meetup groups (like we already do for WordCamps) to record presentations and tutorials that can be posted to WordPress.tv, helping meetup groups offer WordPress classes in their community, and getting involved with mentoring WordPress clubs at local schools and universities. Oh, and we’ll send out some WordPress buttons and stickers to the groups that join in, because everyone loves buttons and stickers.
We’re also putting together some cool resources for people who want to start a new meetup group. There will be a field guide to getting started and some supplies to help you get your group going, and a forum for organizers to talk to and learn from each other.
Over time, we’ll be talking to organizers and looking at what other expenses we can absorb and what other support we can provide to local groups. For now, we’re starting with the organizer dues. If you currently run a WordPress meetup group (whether you are using Meetup.com or not) or would like to start a WordPress meetup group in your area, please fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. Filling in the survey doesn’t obligate you to join the official group, it just gives us a starting point to a) find out what groups are around/interested, and b) get some information on existing groups and their expenses and needs. Meetup.com will contact the group organizers who’ve said they’d like to join the new program, and will walk them through the logistics of the change and answer questions before helping them to opt-in officially.
So, if you currently run a WordPress meetup group, or you would like to start one, please fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. I can’t wait to see more meetups!
1 – Adapted from “meetup” definition at dictionary.com.
2 – Didn’t know about profiles? Check out http://profiles.wordpress.org/users/yourwordpressdotorgusernamehere (put in the username you use in the WordPress.org forums) to see yours!
The final session selections for DrupalCon Denver were announced this week. DrupalCon will take place March 19-23, 2012. Get your tickets soon so that you don't miss out on over 100 sessions across 8 tracks! This year we have added tracks specifically for Non-profit, Government & Education, in addition to Community, Commerce, Mobile, Design & User Experience, Business & Strategy, Coding & Development, Site Building, and Core Conversations.
Conference Dates:
March 19 - Pre-conference trainings -- over 16 from beginners to advanced + API Hack-a-thon
March 20 - 22 - Three complete days of 104 sessions starting with Keynotes: Dries Buytaert, Founder of Drupal and Drupal Project lead, Mitchell Baker, chairperson for the Mozilla Foundation, and Luke Wroblewski, digital product leader coming to talk about mobile.
March 22 - Drupal Means Business - included with conference registration to learn how to integrate Drupal into your business.
March 23 - All-day Contribution Sprint -- one of the largest anywhere!
Plus, parties, ski trips, networking, contests and more, all for the $350 conference fee! Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for helping this to remain one of the lowest cost open source conferences around.
Get your ticket to DrupalCon Denver today. What are you waiting for? We want to see you in Denver!
P.S. Conference registration is $350 until February 21 or when tickets are gone! Early registration helps us to plan the conference and keep our costs low by only ordering what is needed. A limited number of 1/2-priced student tickets are still available.
Follow @drupalcon on Twitter or find us on Facebook.
Con el lanzamiento de Joomla! 2.5, la comunidad de usuarios ha puesto un gran énfasis en que la instalación del CMS y el proceso de gestión de cambios sean tan simples y directos como sea posible.
Esto permitirá a los usuarios migrar más fácilmente y con frecuencia a la última versión de Joomla!, y aprovechar todas las ventajas de seguridad asociadas con el funcionamiento del nuevo código. Creemos que los usuarios Joomla! de todo el mundo agradecerán realmente este nuevo proceso.
Comience ahora mismo:
The Joomla Project’s latest CMS release includes a release of the project’s PHP Framework: Joomla Platform. In 2010 the project made plans to officially decouple the core of Joomla (now the Platform) from the CMS. This allows site implementers to utilize both the full featured CMS, and as well as allow developers to use the light but powerful Joomla Platform core to power web applications.
The Joomla 2.5 CMS release includes notable features that until now have been available only to those developers who have been using the Joomla Platform as a stand alone application. Among others, some of my favorites are:
Drupal.org has over 725,000 registered members in 228 countries. However, only a very small percentage of this members contribute back to the project. Why is this? How can we attract more contributors? What can we do to make it easier for people to contribute? Which areas of the Drupal project would people want to contribute?
To get answers to these questions, two surveys were conducted in 2011 by the community to understand the experience of contributing or considering to contribute to the Drupal project.
This is a combined report of 358 respondents’ responses to the surveys.
MethodologyThe first survey focused on the Drupal contribution experience for the Prairie initiative and received 303 responses. It was written and conducted by Leisa Reichelt (leisareichelt) that ran from April 25, 2011 to September 20, 2011.
The second, the Getting Involved survey, [list of questions] received 55 responses. It was written and conducted by Heather James (heather), Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry) and Lisa Rex (lisarex) from October 21, 2011 to November 9, 2011. This survey focused on the respondent’s Drupal profile; their expectations, roadblocks, motivations; and Drupal areas that need most contributors, among many other things.
Profile of the respondents Prairie SurveyOf the 303 respondents, 64% were non-coders and 31% were non-active contributors.
A big majority (71%) of the respondents from the survey identified themselves as “an established, active member of the community”. The majority of the respondents regularly contribute (41%) and a good amount stated that they contribute occasionally (36%). The majority of the non-active contributors (36%) have never contributed to the project.
The majority of the respondents identified themselves as Site Builder (68%), and/or Developer (59%). A significant portion of respondents identified themselves as Themer (34%) and/or Project Manager (29%). It is also worth noting that 73% of the respondents cited Drupal as their source of income.
Note: Each of the surveys focused on different aspects of Drupal contributions.
Executive SummaryThe findings from both surveys are summarized below, but also see:
From the Getting Involved survey, it was found that the big motivator for people to contribute was simply to improve Drupal and support its community (40%). The other motivator was to grow their knowledge and network (25%). However, when the Getting Involved survey asked about their opinion about the existing community structure, a majority of the respondents (48.9%) had a negative reaction. They thought it was fragmented, chaotic, not great and could use improvements.
The majority of respondents of the Prairie survey thought the experience of contributing was:
Respondents of the Getting Involved survey mostly want to contribute on Documentation/technical writing and PHP development/LAMP (54% each). The next area with the most interest is training (46%) and Mentoring/Support (32%).
What areas need the most contributions?The respondents thought documentation (12 respondents), Drupal.org. (7 respondents) and Design/UX/Usability (6 respondents) needed the most attention from other contributors.
What areas of Drupal community do you think need the most contributions?Although the respondents from the second survey thought the contributing experience was “very much” collaborative, majority (47%) thought “Redesign the issue page to make it easier to collaborative effectively” as a “very important” initiative. Besides that, the respondents (overall, non coders and non active contributors) agreed (47%) that “Redesigning parts of Drupal.org to help newbies find ways to start contributing” as “very important”. This number was higher for non active contributors (55%) than the others.
Other FindingsAcross profiles (of the second survey), “Creating ‘team’ pages to aggregate activities and people interested in a topic” (48%) and “Designing better tools for planning large initiatives” (41%) were deemed as “quite important”.
For “Designing a reputation system to show what different people are expert in and how well they are known by the Drupal community” majority of respondents swayed between quite important (32%) to less important (39%). This was also true for non coders and non active contributors.
Roadblocks to contributingThe major roadblock from they getting involved was lack of information on how to get involved (and whom to contact) (42%). This issue of getting started (48%) was also found in the Prairie survey.
Only 16% of the respondents of the Prairie survey visit the ‘Get Involved’ pages on Drupal.org. 46% of Prairie survey respondents took the opportunity to complain about Drupal.org. They wanted a better Drupal.org. (24%), better tools to collaborate (5%), and an efficient issue queue (5%). For Drupal.org., they particularly wanted to find information easily (4%).
How could we improve the experience?To make the experience of contributing better, non-contributors wanted better information to get started. And the contributors reiterated this when asked what would have been helpful when they started contributing. Besides that, the second most important thing that mattered was the human aspect. The personal touch would have been helpful to the contributors while they were starting and the non contributors want to work with experienced contributors. It is worth noting here that a significant number of respondents are interested in helping with this (Training - 46%, Mentoring/Support - 32%). (Responses from the Getting Involved survey)
Other noteworthy thingsWe hope the findings from the survey will be helpful to the Drupal Association and the community on the next big priorities for Drupal.org. It is evident from the findings that a significant effort is required to provide effective, easy-to-find information on how to get started with contributing to the Drupal community. However, help from other community members is needed to keep the momentum going.
Next stepsSome conversations/efforts have begun toward this goal of improving the contributor experience, such as redesigning the Community, Support and Getting started landing pages, redesigning the issue queue and more.
We need to identify areas that need leaders, and areas that need contributors. Contributors are in demand for documentation especially.
If you are interested to contribute to this effort to provide better documentation for getting started with contributing, great! There are several open issues on improving Getting Involved content, including the Getting Involved landing page and Getting Involved Guide. Please visit this link to read about other community initiatives that might be of interest to you. If you are unsure where you can best help, please contact Lisa Rex (lisarex), who can point you in the right direction.
If you have any questions about the survey/findings, please feel free to contact Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry).
Joomla 2.5 is right around the corner. For those of you who want to blog about the launch, talk with your customers or update your extension / template information, here are some resources you can use:
Come one, come all! As of January 18, 2012 nominations are open for the 2012 elections of two "at large" directors of the Drupal Association.
The at large directors are intended to represent the Drupal community. Specifics of the election were decided through a community-based process with participation by dozens of Drupal community members. More details are in the proposal that was approved by the Drupal Association board.
Who can vote?Voting is open to all individuals who have a drupal.org account by the time the elections begin and who have logged in at least once in the past year. These individuals' accounts will be added to the voters list on association.drupal.org and they will have access to the voting.
To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an "instant runoff" method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, see videos linked in this discussion.
How to runCandidates needed! If you are considering running, please head over to the nominations page and read up on what's involved. From there you can fill out a candidate profile. You'll be asked for some information about yourself, like why you're running . When the nominations close, your candidate profile will be published and available for Drupal community members to browse. Comments will be enabled, so please monitor your candidate profile so you can respond to questions from community members.
Elections processElections will be held from January 30 to February 7, 2012. During this period, you can review and comment on candidate profiles on association.drupal.org and engage all candidates through posting to the Drupal Association group. We'll also be scheduling and announcing two phone-in all candidates meetings, where community members and candidates can ask questions and get to know each other.
Thanks and see you at the polls! We'll post another front-page announcement and announce via @drupal on Twitter when we're ready to go.
Hello from Jennifer, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team leader! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation team. As you probably heard, Ariane's role in the Documentation Team has changed, and she is no longer my co-leader (sob!), so I'm looking for a new deputy leader or co-leader (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details). Here's what Ariane and I oversaw in the Documentation Team at the end of 2011, with a look forward to 2012.
September - December EventsThanks to xjm, xenophyle, sven.lauer, Lars Toomre, aenw, rc_100, jn2, aspilicious, chris.leversuch, barlantz, synth3tk, agentrickard, ... and probably more who joined after I made this list -- sorry if I forgot your name! This sprint is still going on, so if you’d like to participate, visit the meta issue, which has full instructions (novice contributors welcome!).
The last quarter of 2011 saw some changes to Drupal.org that are quite beneficial to Documentation writers, editors, and users -- and more are on the way! Here's a list:
Hopefully these changes will help overcome this barrier -- we’ll see!
If you're interested in helping with Drupal documentation:
WordPress.org is officially joining the protest against Senate Bill 968: the Protect IP Act that is coming before the U.S. Senate next week. As I wrote in my post a week ago, if this bill is passed it will jeopardize internet freedom and shift the power of the independent web into the hands of corporations. We must stop it.
On January 18, 2012 many sites around the web — from small personal blogs to internet institutions like Mozilla, Wikipedia, reddit, and I Can Has Cheezburger? – will be going dark in protest and to drive their visitors to sites like americancensorship.org to take action and help fight the passage of the Protect IP Act. So will WordPress.org.
If you want to join the protest by blacking out your WordPress site or applying a ribbon, there is now a variety of blackout plugins in the WordPress.org plugins directory. While joining the protest in this manner is laudable, please don’t forget to also make those phone calls to U.S. Senators — they’re the ones with the voting power.
Hi everybody -
Hope you all had a great holiday, and are easing into 2012 nicely! I'll cut right to the chase with this announcement: effective pretty well immediately (as this has been in the works for a little while now), I'm stepping down as Documentation Co-lead.
Awwww, sad, I know! It's been quite the experience, and I feel like along with Jennifer and the other docs enthusiasts, we've gotten a lot done over the course of the last year and a bit of official leadership term. It's been great helping set the direction of the documentation plans, and working with everyone who's been interested in improving the documentation, as well as many of the core and contrib development teams.
After taking some time off in the summer to decompress and figure out where I wanted to go with all of this, I realized that despite feeling like I've been effective in the position, it's taken a lot of my time away from other things in my life, and from actually writing docs and working on other areas of Drupal. And that was definitely okay for a certain timeframe, but it's not something I want to do forever. Now that the Community Documentation infrastructure changes have been rolled out, my side of the leadership role is effectively being put on hiatus. We've talked this over with Dries, and he also feels it's fine for Jennifer to continue managing the API docs and infra solo.
What does this mean to you all? Probably not any huge changes, I'll still poke my head in on the issue queue, IRC, etc. now and then. But my "official responsibilities" will no longer exist, including hosting Documentation sprints, attending meetings and docs hour, doing docs conference sessions, etc. And when I do work on Docs, it'll more often be in a writing/editing capacity. I'm also hoping to spend some more time doing other fun things like patch reviews for Drupal core, and continuing to attend Drupal events. ...And also, spending more time knitting, socializing, doing yoga, and all those other things I neglected while I was spending all my evenings online!
My time helping lead the project's documentation team has had high points and low points, but overall I feel like I've learned a ton, gotten a lot done, and am leaving the state of the docs in a better place than when I started. That's really all I could hope for! Thanks so much to Jennifer for being an amazing co-lead with whom to share a brain, and to all the fantastic Drupal and docs enthusiasts who've made this experience a positive one.
I hope to see the tentative docs infrastructure plans come to fruition during the coming year. This will result in a small team of dedicated core docs maintainers (including myself) taking over the helm of the future "curated" core docs section, and also see docs maintainers appointed for other contrib projects' curated documentation. And of course, work on API documentation and docs infrastructure will continue; Jennifer and other team members have been focused on this for a while now.
Keep rocking the docs folks, thanks for everything, and I will see you around!
-------------
Jennifer here... I'd like to thank Ariane for a great year of co-leadership! I'm currently planning on staying on as Documentation Team Leader for 2012.
What I'd like to do is take on a deputy leader or co-leader sometime soon (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details and an official call for interest/applications). This way we can have a smooth transition to the next documentation leader, and start the trend of time-limited leadership for positions like this in the Drupal community (to prevent burn-out, let new people have a chance to lead, etc.). Anyway, rest assured I'll still be asking Ariane for advice and help, and I'm excited that she's still excited about being involved in documentation in her new capacity!
You are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it.
Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project — having users from all over the globe that span the political spectrum is evidence that we are doing our job and democratizing publishing, and we don’t want to alienate any of our users no matter how much some of us may disagree with some of them personally. Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule, because there’s something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know about and understand, because it affects us all.
Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web. Every time you click Publish, you are a part of that change, whether you are posting canny political insight or a cat that makes you LOL. How would you feel if the web stopped being so free and independent? I’m concerned freaked right the heck out about the bills that threaten to do this, and as a participant in one of the biggest changes in modern history, you should be, too.
You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of Sherlock*, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).
Some thoughts:
Blogging is a form of activism. You can be an agent of change. Some people will tell you that taking action is useless, that online petitions, phone calls to representatives, and other actions won’t change a single mind, especially one that’s been convinced of something by lobbyist dollars. To those people, I repeat the words of Margaret Mead:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
We are not a small group. More than 60 million people use WordPress — it’s said to power about 15% of the web. We can make an impact, and you can be an agent of change. Go to Stop American Censorship for more information and a bunch of ways you can take action quickly, easily, and painlessly. The Senate votes in two weeks, and we need to help at least 41 more senators see reason before then. Please. Make your voice heard.
*Yes, the latest episode of Sherlock is good. Stephen Moffatt + Russell Tovey = always good
WordPress 3.3.1 is now available. This maintenance release fixes 15 issues with WordPress 3.3, as well as a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability that affected version 3.3. Thanks to Joshua H., Hoang T., Stefan Zimmerman, Chris K., and the Go Daddy security team for responsibly disclosing the bug to our security team.
Download 3.3.1 or visit Dashboard → Updates in your site admin.
