Simplenews is a quick and easy way to set up and manage newsletters on Drupal, but if you add it to a site which already has users, you might want a way to quickly subscribe all your users to your newsletter.

Rather than click through all users and manually subscribe them - which can be a little bit boring if you have thousands of users - you can run a few SQL queries to mass-subscribe everyone in one go.

It was a drupal filled week.  We set two new Drupal sites free into the world, and signed up to sponsor DrupalSouth.

DrupalSouth is happening in Wellington on the weekend of 23-24 January 2010. It promises to be New Zealand's largest gathering of Drupalppl with Australia and elsewhere due to the proximity of linux.conf.au taking place the week immediately before hand. The totally fabulous Angie Byron and Emma Jane Hogbin will be speaking, as will scores of other great Drupal professionals, and not-so professionals.  After attending Melbourne DrupalCamp earlier this year, I am really looking forward to participating and getting to know more of the local community. 

For the past 6 months or so, I've been working with a small team of people to put together Open Edge 2009, a one day forum to explore open education issues for Australian schools.  We've got a phenomenal list of contributors involved and I'm really looking forward to it.

Saturday September 19 2009 was software freedom day. Creative Contingencies took part again as part of our commitment to the free and open source software community.

It's a challenging day.  Most of the challenge revolves around promoting the event, and knowing who to target. Our own focus is largely in the education and small business sector, so naturally we see strong benefits in using Free and Open Source Software in schools and small companies.  We had a very mixed crowd this year - with lots of members of Melbourne PC and Apple Users Society of Melbourne taking part for the first time. This is really exciting as we extend the software freedom message to these passionate computer groups, who may not have appreciated that they too could enjoy Free Software.

Brianna Laugher did a phenomenal job of designing and delivering a comprehensive program of talks and workshops, and Melbourne PC's facilities provided ample space and resources to make it all happen.  Unfortunately we were unable to harness the resources and energy to video the talks but will certainly make more of an effort to do that next year. Ultimately, time and energy are limited commodities when it comes to an event such as Software Freedom Day and I'm very pleased with what we were able to achieve.