I wonder how much crossover there is in the Drupal users and role playing gamers crowds. I'm contemplating running a Paranoia RPG one-shot next DrupalCon. Who'd be interested? (If you don't know what Paranoia RPG is, you probably aren't all that interested, but the brief description is that it's a Dungeons & Dragons type game in a dark future run by a paranoid computer. There's lots of intrigue, betrayal and death. It's a dark dark dark humor game, and it's basically impossible to meet the mission objectives and completing them isn't really the point.)

Thanks very much to the hard work of Sam Boyer, we have managed to release an alpha version of Panels 2 for Drupal 6! Yes, it's finally here!

There are a series of known issues which you can find in the release notes so I wouldn't say this is 'ready' but it's ready for people to start fiddling with, at least. We're to the point where developers can start generating patches to fix stuff, too.

I have just checked in a major change to the Views API. Details can be found in the advanced help under api.html (and the handlers and plugins) pages, but the short version is that all handlers and plugins are now separated into their own files in order to conserve memory and not loaded unneeded code. This required implementing an API versioning system, and the upshot of this is that a new hook must be implemented by all Views modules: hook_views_api(). Without the proper use of this hook, the *.views.inc files will not be included.