Summertime is the time for camping - but in this case camping involves geeking out and stretching your brain indoors on sunny summer weekends for the good of code. With many of our Cascadian neighbours holding camps in the recent past, I figured a compendium would be appropriate.

My personal Drupal quest took an ill-fated turn with a laborious wait at the border aboard public conveyance. Fortunately for on bus wi-fi and a Nokia N78 I'm testing (thanks to mobile guru Roland Tanglao), I could grouse about the delay via Twitter and check in on other #dcs08 chatter via Twemes.

I finally arrived downtown Seattle in time for the event wrapping up in West Seattle. The good news was I wouldn't miss the after-session beer camp at Pike Street - so I replenished with some Thai curry and luscious iced coffee and trundled with my backpack over to the brewpub.

Over a couple of pitchers, i caught up with the CivicActions and North Studios crew (who were both a big part of DCV's great vibe) and checked in with the other Vancouverites - my co-worker Audrey and Ryan from the ImageX clan - who had wisely rolled down the day before.

After enjoying grog with Drupal pirates, I ended up on more hi-jinks and urban exploration with photographer and developer Matt Freedman and Avi from Victoria but will save documentation of our exploits for another channel (videos: Dead band at Fremont Solstice Parade party, Critical Mass Ride in Seattle, Checking in from Seattle).

Anyhow, this post is to tell you about the camps, the sessions, and all that ... and offer congrats to the intrepid organizers of Drupal Camps in Portland, Alberta, and Seattle and pass along some useful recap resources (and help pre-announce Drupal Camp Victoria) ~ so let's get at it:

Update on jQuery Update

First off, a slightly overdue update: jQuery Update module for Drupal 5 has been released with jQuery 1.2.6 (the current version!). Thanks to all who took the reigns on that one, especially Steve McKenzie, who took on co-maintainership, and sun, who pushed this rc1 release. I believe all known bugs that the new jQuery caused in core js files, such as upload.js, collapse.js and others, have been totally ironed out but of course jQuery-enhanced contrib modules are another matter entirely. I found out the hard way that the upgrade to 1.2.6 totally breaks TinyMCE which unfortunately is a module that is not receiving much love these days from its maintainer. Not to get too far off-topic but there is a new WYSIWYG controller and API/framework module called Wysiwig being developed by sun and quicksketch, the goal of which is "to provide generic hooks to implement contrib module plugins with content editors", so it sounds like TinyMCE module's days are numbered anyway.

You probably saw all of these articles already but ... in case you missed any ... get comfy, pour a beverage and do some reading about Open Source CMSs in the news:

Drupal and The Future of News

Tech writer Kurt Cagle from Open Source Pixels {cribbed article bio: managing editor of XML.com, lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is beginning to wonder what happened to summer - Ed note: Ditto on the summer ;-)} offers a wide-ranging narrative about his experiences with Drupal, (including a name-check of Bryght/Raincity Studios) in his June 1, 2008 article. Well worth a read for his interesting historical and technical perspectives.

For those who weren't in attendance at Drupalcamp Vancouver last month, Mark, Hubert, and myself prepared and presented a production version of our internal base theme that we use for client development called "Base5".

Since then, Hubert has fine-tuned the theme in preparation to contribute back to the community. We've also changed the name to "Basic".

Drupal Camper Alert!

Prepare for two impending Drupal Camps - in Seattle, (Organized by the Seattle Drupal User Group), and in Alberta at the University of Lethbridge with Michael Warf at the helm.

You can participate by presenting, helping out or by sponsoring (AB, SEA) - Yes! join the sponsors of Drupal Camp Vancouver by "paying it forward" - the self-education of Drupalist is paramount to success!

Specifically, Seattle Drupal Camp seeks presenters to speak about:

• Views
• Panels 2
• jQuery
• Contributing Back (anything but code)
• Theming Views, Panels, and CCK
• SimpleTest

Robin Barre from CivicActions is your contact for signing on and making your knowledge known to the community.

I'll resist writing a lengthy treatise about how worthy these events will be for Drupal entusiasts and fotering community relations and instead provide a quick lowdown with details. Be sure to say "hi" to any RCS crew who make it - we are fairly decent folk ;-).