I think this slideshow and talk makes some really important points for the future of Drupal and our community:
Bryan Ruby: Drupal 6.17: The Drupal Super Fixer-Upper -
As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don't talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal's developers.
Earl Miles has announced the first beta of Panels Everywhere. I'll let Earl tell you about it ., but it lets you use panels for all of the blocks and other design elements of your web site.
We've been playing around with a new product called Artisteer .It claims to be the #1 Drupal Theme Generator software package, which I guess is a fair bet considering it's the only one I know of.
Basically it's an interesting piece of software, and lets you generate themes for Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress. The good news is that it generates nice-looking basic themes, and is actually quite flexible in many different ways.
The bad news is that the themes are fairly basic - so they're really handy if you want to do some simple prototyping, color visualization, menuing, etc. You can build different sorts of block types, fonts, coloring, backgrounds, etc. all day long.
The bad news is that in the current incarnation you can't really do several fairly important things - or at least things that are important to most Drupal designers -
This includes:
- Liquid layout themes
- inserting new block regions - it only supports the very basic left and right sidebars, footer, and content regions
- Any sort of specific theming that is not part of it's repertoire.
- Panels just plain doesn't behave in the themes generated by Artisteer - this is a deal-breaker for most of my sites.
I'll have a more thorough review after I've had a chance to work with it more - but for now, all I can say is that it's a good tool for maybe the first 80% of a theming project, or for a theming project with very simple requirements. But after that it's going to be time to whip out your PHP and CSS skills.
So it's like this -
We keep having people in our lives who are having trouble getting the hang of using Drupal as an end user. And we keep covering the same ground with individuals - how do I add content, how do I edit my site, how do I handle blocks, how do I write a simple view? So we're thinking - hey, let's do this on-line and see if we can't help out a whole slug of people at once.
For various reasons I just could not make it to Drupalcon in Washington. So I guess I'll have to settle for going to Paris 
. Anyway, I'm sure that a lot of you are in the same boat. The good folks at Drupalcon are videotaping most of the sessions, or at least are trying to. If you want to follow along, this search string will probably find all of the sessions as they go up at Archive.org.
I'll try to bring you some more info from Drupalcon from our remote outpost in the far north as news trickles in. -
Update - Videos are being linked to as they're brought up on http://drupal.org/node/385952
Ack - those of you who don't have accounts on the site will have noticed that a whole lot of content showed up today. That's what happens when you don't look at the site as an anonymous user for weeks. Seems there was a little problem caused by some access control modules we'd installed but hadn't removed correctly. Anyway, all the stuff that was posted for the last few weeks suddenly will have shown up today for anonymous users.
Sorry for the problem. We don't think it'll happen again ---
