Drupal Gardens Beta (http://drupalgardens.com) hopes to be to Drupal what Wordpress.com is to Wordpress. "With Drupal Gardens, there's nothing to install and no servers to manage. We take care of everything on the backend so you can focus on building great sites." The site is hosted for you and you configure it through a simple interface.

Learn By The Drop presents a video showing how to install Drupal locally by using the Acquia Drupal stack installer. Acquia's installer is an all-in-one package that installs Acquia Drupal, MySQL, PHP and PhpMyAdmin. Acquia Drupal is a Drupal distribution that comes packaged with many useful contributed modules including CCK, Views and PathAuto.

Aaron Winborn, of Advomatic and Embedded Media Field fame, has completed writing Drupal Multimedia, to be published by Packt Publishing this September (and you can pre-order now)! Packt will be donating a portion of the royalties to the Drupal Association, in keeping with their long-standing policy of supporting the Open Source community.

In Drupal news, version 6.3 has been released fixing problems and plugging security holes. But even happier news is the fact that there are release candidates for the Views and CCK (and organic groups) modules. I had tried version 6 when it was first released but stopped experimenting with it because so many of the modules I use in version 5 were not available. I decided at the time to hold off on upgrading. Since then, more modules were updated but some couldn't be updated because they were dependent on Views or some other module.

A case study presenting reasons Drupal should be used by institutions and in libraries. This specifically has a comparison between the proprietary CMS Fatwire and Drupal but the reasons presented for choosing Drupal are still valid in general.

Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce by Michael Peacock, is published by Packt, and is aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. Using Drupal e-Commerce, you can have a powerful website and a powerful online store.

The basics of Drupal are covered, for users who are unfamiliar with Drupal, and then the fun of e-Commerce begins, covering:

A walk through of setting up an example Drupal site using media mover. The sample video site is called DruTube.
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Awakened Voice has posted Getting Started with Amazon S3 video.

Pirillo Starts Large Scale Community CMS Project - Chris Pirillo has announced a new, large scale open source CMS project that aims to “de-geekify” website tools (announcement video above). — The project will be built on the open source Drupal framework.