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Would you give $20 for that feature/fix/documentation you've always wanted in a module/theme/distribution?

Yes? Great! Would you pledge $20 for the chance to give that $20? Wonderful! Please make your tax deductible contribution, which will only be charged if we raise enough to do this, in the next three days!

If not, why not? Serious question— the goal is not to extort money from you, the goal is to extort either money or information (or both). What would make you unwilling to pledge money toward something you think Drupal needs? Please let me know by contact form or in the comments.

So you have goals to evaluate for worthiness and practicality, we intend that Snowball (the platform to get community initiatives rolling) will:

• Allow asynchronous aggregation of wants and needs. We don't want a mad rush of fundraising campaigns (like this one); instead we want to see what people are offering to put time or resources toward, and then help an actionable plan take shape.
• Provide a platform for the instigators, the organizers, the advocates, who are crucial to making things happen in any community.
• Give people with more money than time or talent (for a particular task, so that means most of us) a direct way to contribute.
• Get your most-wanted improvement to Drupal made... provided we find enough other likeminded people who act on their convictions.
• Make the world a better place.

Is this a fool's errand? If so, i have the credentials. but please say why Snowball as a concept doesn't hold together. If not a fool's errand, i think we can continue to broaden those involved in this "initiative to make more initiatives possible" until it is possible itself. Join in and even pledge a few bucks for the effort on CrowdTilt while every cent (if the funding level is reached at all) will go to build it.

Thanks to Tony Groff, Agaric has a ticket to DrupalCon Denver to give away to a reader of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 who sends in a story (or picture!) of a favorite use of the 1,110 page book— today!

Did Jacine Luisi's tour de force break a barrier to Drupal 7 theming for you? Did Károly Négyesi's 4-page "Developing from a Human Mindset" chapter change the way you do Drupal? Did you win a bet because your favorite module was mentioned? Did the book save your life by absorbing the impact of a small meteorite when you took it to the beach for some light reading? Let us know!

In other DGD7 news, Greg Anderson has posted Drush 5 updates to his fantastic Drush chapter. Check it out, and don't forget to sign up for updates like this and new tips and material (low-volume newsletter; fewer than once a month).

On my quest to improve a client's Drupal site performance I considered installing the Alternative PHP Cache. It reduces the overhead of compiling the PHP sources into opcode on each request by caching the compiled code. 2bits posted a very good case study about PHP opcode caches a while ago.

Get the most out of (and into) your page cache: Leave AJAX disabled in your Views, especially with exposed filters

We received the go-ahead from Studio Daniel Libeskind to take their web site live a few weeks ago, but it was presenting here at Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit that we realized we should mention it to the world.

There is an important correction to be made to the top-selling Drupal book, the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

The slogan printed on the cover is incorrect. The book does not contain "Everything you need to know about Drupal"— rather, a central goal of the book is to show how to keep learning and growing within the Drupal community. Everything to know about Drupal could never fit in one book or set of books.

Agaric, as a worker collective, does not have bosses and employees. We have skilled, hard-working teammates coming together to figure out and do ... everything.

We will make an exception to hire an excellent business director, project leader, attention-to-detail-and-the-big-picture person. If you happen to be a front end dev too, then great! If not, well, part of your role will be helping bring on more talent.

Congratulations to the new leadership committee for May First People Link!

Agaric is proud and excited to be a member of this organization, building fantastic shared internet resources out of open source free software, immense volunteer time, and member's dues.

Update: Ticket taken. But if you want to come, please read below the fold.

We have an extra ticket to DrupalCon and it should probably be yours.

One ticket transfer is supposed to be in process. Might as well make it two. contact me and leave your phone number, as the coordination may be interesting. I'm at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers now.

I'd love to know your story and why attending sounds like a good idea (and signing up for news of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 completion might give bonus points!)

With Drupal 7's third and final release candidate unleashed on us all this morning, it is long past time to help the #D7CX movement with a seasonal offering of our own. The most fitting gift would be porting a Drupal 6 module, but it wouldn't be a modern winter holiday without an environmentally irresponsible brand new toy: Introducing the Xray module, designed to help site builders and module developers investigate a Drupal 7 site.

The feature i'd like to point out in relation to porting modules and developing for Drupal 7 is Xray's report showing permission machine names (screenshot below). Permissions in Drupal 7 have human-friendly translatable titles, which is awesome, but the machine names – which module developers must use – have disappeared entirely from the user interface.