Drupal 4.7.1 has been released, with some nice bug fixes and some security upgrades. (Drupal 4.6.7 has been released, too.) People should look at upgrading their Drupal sites as soon as possible.

Anyone running previous versions of Drupal should really consider upgrading to 4.7.x just for the many improvements in functionality and performance. If you're not convinced, check out this review of Drupal 4.7 in NewsForge.

The world of dynamic websites with pages served by code rather than static content is always moving -- which is a sign that it's alive. This release addresses some "moderate" security issues. If you're like me, and have hacked and modified several modules and files on your Drupal-powered site(s), you'll want to take the patching route. Four simple patches. Very easy. No database changes.

This is considered a non-critical security release. Several minor bug fixes are also included. More information is at the Drupal site.

(To our hosted clients: the update has already been completed on your sites.)

We just updated pingVision to Drupal 4.6.3, a security-fix that addresses another xmp-rpc breach:

The Drupal project has released version 4.6.3 of its open-source content management platform. Drupal 4.6.3 is a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system. Drupal 4.6.3 also fixes a new security vulnerability in the third-party XML-RPC library that Drupal ships with. Since the same bug is also present in the Drupal 4.5 series, Drupal 4.5.5 is released as well. If you cannot upgrade at once, we strongly suggest that you remove the xmlrpc.php file from your Drupal installation's root directory. The xmlrpc.php file is used only for Drupal to receive XML-RPC calls.

Anyone running Drupal should update immediately. The download tarball is here. Also, if you are running Drupal 4.5.x, there is an update for you here.

This was one of those things that simmered for a long long time, but then came together at the very last minute. Back when Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Hardins started blogging about a women's blogger conference as a pro-active response to the persistent "where are all the female bloggers?" questions that seem to keep popping up, Lisa and I began a sporadic email correspondence. I kept saying, "Go for it!"

And go for it they all did. The sold-out BlogHer Conference '05 is happening this Saturday, July 30th, in Santa Clara, CA. The panels lined up are very impressive.

I'm really impressed with the event they and others have pulled together. (And I am not at all surprised at the overwhelmingly positive response from women who are participating in and attending the conference.) But I've also been heartbroken that I cannot attend. I'm just too overextended to break away for a few days.

So you can imagine my excitement when Lisa came to me with a question: Could we host some sort of IRC chatroom? I said "yes" before I even thought about it.

Since then it's been a flurry of activity on my part trying to figure out the best way to do this. I'll write more on that later. For now, I'll just say that the chat will be web-based -- no IRC client is needed. (Sorry, geeks and geekettes, but we must make this easy for the non-technical folks.) The specific URL of the chatroom will be linked from our home page using a very conspicuous BlogHer graphic.

This is all very last-minute, and we're doing our little part on faith that if we build it they will come. It's our hope that many women (and men) interested in how the internets are changing how women (and men) do business, get active, interact and so on will stop by the official chatroom and get in on the discussion.

We at pingVision are proud to be Program Partners for the BlogHer Conference '05.