Google will be sponsoring 20 Drupal projects as part of their Summer Of Code this year, that's a phenomenal result for the Drupal community.

Thank you to Google for the unbelievably generous support. This represents $100,000 worth of financial contributions to Drupal development, $10,000 of which will be donated to the Drupal Association.

A few of the projects that will be worth keeping an eye on are the Jabber/XMPP integration, RSS/Atom improvements, an SMS framework, and an automated staging environment toolkit.

Lullabot have just released Lullacons Pack 1, a set of GPL icons for Drupal and other Open Source projects. These are 8-bit PNGs with 1-bit transparency so they will work in Internet Explorer.

They've also given people access to the original Photoshop .psd files, so you can create your own derivative versions. As per the rules of the GPL, if you do use them to create a new icon set then you have to make your modifications available to other people.

Dammit, if their podcasts weren't groovy enough, now they go and do something cool like this.

Steven Wittens writes:

After a long wait, the awesome jQuery library has finally been committed to Drupal core. jQuery 1.0 will be part of the next major Drupal release, for which the code freeze is about to begin.

What is jQuery I hear you ask:

jQuery is a Javascript library that takes this motto to heart: Writing Javascript code should be fun. jQuery acheives this goal by taking common, repetitive, tasks, stripping out all the unnecessary markup, and leaving them short, smart and understandable.

This is a very exciting development for Drupal opening up a whole world of new user interface improvements. As an example of some of the things that can be done have a look at Steve's colour picker widget. Now that's some cool stuff.

There's more info on jQuery and how it will fit into Drupal in the Lullabot podcast with jQuery's author John Resig.

As part of their expanding developerWorks series of articles IBM have decided to use Drupal for a sample IT project entitled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”.

They evaluated a number of different Content Management Systems/Frameworks including Ruby On Rails, Typo3 and Mambo, but in the end they went with Drupal.

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we'll revisit these and any new entries in the field.

Given the extremely high standard of the developerWorks articles I'm going to be keeping an eye on this. I'm always on the lookout for new ways to make Drupal jump through hoops.

Update: The second part of the series has been published, focusing on designing for an effective user experience.

Update: Here's an overview page linking to all 5 articles.

Drupal 4.6.1 upgrade done, spam filters in place, comments open. Let the fun begin.