[EDIT: See the Drupal handbook for the current PDF]

This year has not gone as I had expected for a variety of reasons, but that's all right.

Long term sustainable documentation with Drupal is complex. Drupal core moves and changes in ways that have unpredictable effects on documentation. Modules get absorbed into others, some removed, technologies added, behavior changed. Adding on the additional explosive growth of the contributed modules it's mind boggling. How to structure documentation in a way that people can have defined targets for what 'must' be updated vs random one time contributed document that only applies to a particular configuration?

The three main books for people,(install / customization / developer ) are currently at 1414 printed pages. That's an insane number to maintain. The developer handbook itself is generally kept up to date in the key areas by several developers who understand the benefit of being able to look up something they've figured out.

Customization has theming and it would be nice to break that out to it's own book, but so far the folks who have said they were going to do this have not done so. I have someone working on stuff for Drupal 6 theming so I still have hope for the future there.

So, what is the one thing we need to do better on for a major version release? Installation and configuration.

Last week I had a process go crazy on my server. In the end the resulting crash left 2 of the tables on my site in an invalid state and database tools unable to read them. While this was annoying it was not fatal.

I was able to restore the site from the last good backup in about 10 minutes. My current backup schedule is once a week so I lost one post (content I found on /planet's aggregator) and the 3 comments on it (which is annoying as they had some good links). For now I think I will keep my weekly backup schedule but I may be changing that.

Good backups are important. It's my site and as haphazard as it can be, I'm kind of proud of it. I'd really be annoyed if I lost all of my content.

[edit: The correct date was June 5th]

On June 5, I will be giving a presentation on Drupal to the Sonoma County Systems Administrators group.

It's been a while since I have given a presentation and I think I can come up with some interesting stuff for the group. As they are a systems administrators group, I will be approaching this from a SysAdmin point of view, not so much a development point of view.

Developing a site using Drupal is only part of the fun, long term sustainable maintenance is the real goal. Drupal is a very powerful tool that lets you communicate. Maintaining that tool after you've invested time and personalization into it, is an important part of implementing your site.

While it's true, I do this as a hobby, professionally I am paid to implement and maintain sustainable Enterprise solutions (primarily Windows centric solutions). There is not a lot of documentation on this as Drupal is only part of your web sites eco-system. It's assumed you will learn this from the various vender specific site documentation. With the influx of power users and people just converting over to database driven sites, they may not realize that they need to do some research off Drupal.org as well to maintain and plan for their sites longevity.