We've been in hiring mode for a while now. As most any Drupal Service provider will tell you, there's big demand for people and companies that have an expertise in Drupal. There's also a bit of a shortage of people to satisfy that demand. We've decided on a strategy of hiring great people regardless of Drupal experience and then getting them plugged into the "Drupal way" of doing things as quickly as we can.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert writes:

In the January 2007 issue, Linux Format reviewed Drupal 4.7 and compared it to Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone and Typo3.

I don't have the publication, and the online magazine just has a list of contents:

Roundup: Content management systems - Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone, Typo3

But when you look at all the checkmarks in the page image below....

They've been with us over a month already, so I offer this belated announcement of our latest hires who filled previously announced job openings. (We are still hiring.)

Valerie Gerry, Designer

With a BA, Cum Laude, in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College, and previous work as a graphic designer for the University of Colorado at Boulder, Valerie brings to the team that rare combination of a science background and artistic sensibility, with interests in working towards an understanding of behavior, design, art and movement. At the Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience as well as at Yale University, she did computer programming and database management. She's also co-authored scientific research in the field, based on data she helped capture and analyze. When she's not in the office, she's working towards her MFA at CU Boulder.

Since our transition from an informal partnership headed by founders Laura Scott and Kate Lawrence into a limited liability company in January 2006 as pingVision, LLC, we have designed and developed websites for corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, online media ventures and virtual communities.

With strength in design and coding, we bring to every job experience and expertise in Drupal-based web development, PHP, MySQL, Ajax and Flash, from wireframes to final deployment.

People can download it here (or use this direct link to the .tar.gz file.)

There probably will be a couple of betas after this, followed by a couple of release candidates before the official release of Drupal 5.0. Starting in the next couple of weeks, we'll start using Drupal 5.0 as the development foundation for new sites we develop that won't launch before December or January and don't depend heavily on the hundreds of the contributed modules in the Drupal community. For sites wanting a lot of those functions, we'll either work off of Drupal 4.7 or work module upgrades into the sites' development processes.