This past week, I was chatting with my friend - and ex-boss - Chris Fuller (cfuller12) from Optaros about caching pages for authenticated users.  He'd been implementing authcache to cache pages for his latest deployment but was going to need to do some tweaking to get dynamic aspects of the page working for logged in users.  I've been busy writing proposals and keeping the Achieve-machine moving forward so the development challenge was a great reason to do something

With an attendance of 80 to 90 people, and participants from all over the United States and even Ecuador, the first SANDcamp (San Diego Drupal Camp) was a success.

A few reports have already been written about the "Fields in Core" coding sprint that was held December 15th - 19th at the Acquia offices in Andover, Massachusetts. While some of them are more technical, I decided to try to give you a good idea of what we spent our time doing. For the more technical ones check the "field in core" group.

NAMM (the International Music Products Association) launched their WannaPlayMusic.com site this week, coinciding with Music Week, May 5th through the 9th.

Achieve's own Bill O'Connor (Drupal user csevb10) will participating as a mentor in this year's Drupal Summer of Code aggregator project. Bill has done substantial work on the Drupal Simplefeed module, working closely with Ted Serbinski (m3avrck) on a major overhaul in the summer of 2006 and the Drupal 6 upgrade earlier this year.

Drupal earns another feather in it's cap today with the announcement of the Webware 100 awards. The Drupal CMS is one of the nine finalists in the "Photos and Pubishing" category, selected by Webware and voted on by over two million Web 2.0 application users.

I have been working on upgrading the caching contrib modules to Drupal 6 and started to notice some patterns and duplicated code, which led me to think Drupal's approach to caching in general. We currently have a fairly limited API for caching, but we have a magic bullet that helps us overcome some of these weaknesses: the cache.inc override system. Anyone who has spent time on large production sites knows that one of the easiest ways to see better performance on your Drupal system is to use one of the existing cache mechanisms that I spoke about at Drupalcon Boston.

One of the great things about using open source code for projects is the opportunity to contribute back to the community and get a little recognition for your hard work. Just like the code though, there's a "Drupal way" for patch contribution and the goal of this article is to help you expedite your plan to contribute module patches back to the community and to limit the difficulty you will have in getting those patches accepted.

1. Pulling the latest code.