For the past five weeks I've been working with the Nutch open source search engine and web crawler. Nutch is at the point that Drupal was a year and a half ago. For Drupal, that "meant lots of potential," "poised for explosive growth," and "lacking in documentation." We had the first Drupal conference in February of 2005, and though we expected only a handful of people, many more showed up!

I'm extremely pleased to note that Matt Westgate of Lullabot has agreed to be a coauthor on the book. I'm pleased not only because Matt brings a wealth of Drupal experience to this endeavor, but because I'll be having lunch with him more often.

I've just committed a version of the pubcookie module that's compatible with Drupal 4.7. I also added a bit to the README to explain how the pubcookie module works:

I do a lot of testing with Drupal, so I need a quick and easy way to create a new Drupal site, create the associated database, and get started. There are probably better solutions out there, but this is what I use. It's a bash script that I developed with the help of killes sometime last year. I just updated it for Drupal 4.7.

Now when I want to create a new Drupal site I just type

newdrupal47 foo bar