We’re about ready to launch our new, significantly revamped Developer site to the world. If you blink tomorrow night (or refresh your browser) and all of a sudden things look a lot different, you’re not going crazy. It will be different!

In addition to the snazzy visual changes, we’ll be implementing some functional ones as well. You’ll be able to rate each item as helpful or unhelpful, and will be able to view and submit user-contributed comments (a la php.net). You will be able to browse items by “recent additions”, “most popular” and “most viewed” along with category, version and edition. You will be able to quickly share articles using several types of social network links such as Facebook, Google bookmarks, Digg, and many more.

The target date for the new site is the evening of Wednesday, July 30th.

We hope you like the new look of the site, and as always, we welcome your comments. A big thank you to our website developer Lam for all of his hard work!

Ok, so I know it’s a bit last-minute, but for those of you who are looking to sharpen your PHP and MySQL skills, there is an online community college course starting this week. It’s taught by Foothill College, one of the local colleges in the Silicon Valley area.

The class is CIS 52N and it’s completely online so you don’t need to be local to take the course, though you will be charged more if you live “out of state” (outside California). You can register for this (or any other) spring quarter course through April 18th.

For more information, or to register for this course, go to Foothill College’s website. Foothill runs classes year around so check out their website (or your own community college) for interesting classes.

Join Sugar Lead Architect and Master Module Builder Majed Itani as he walks through dramatic upgrade-safe customizations. Here’s your chance to see how far Sugar’s flexible architecture can be taken!

This free online webinar will be held on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 10AM PST.

To register for this event, please visit this link.

This webinar is part of the Sugar Developers User Group; we’re aiming to provide free webinars on a variety of topics, offered monthly as schedules permit.

Day Two of SugarCon has begun and we’ve already had some interesting speakers. Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light gave a great talk on how the customer, rather than the company, is in the driver’s seat and is initiating interactions in new and “non-traditional” ways. Out are focus groups, traditional market research and the whole concept of a customer being a targeted market segment. In are blogs, podcasts, community forums, and customer experiences, along with a friendly, honest two-way communication about what companies are doing and where they’re heading.

Listening to his talk, I thought to myself that we here at Sugar are at least starting to get things right, with several conduits for you the developer community to talk with each other (via the forums and the wiki) and hear from us (via our podcasts and this very blog). We’re continuing to focus on strengthening these conduits and encourage your participation. Your honest comments about what we’re doing wrong (and what we’re doing right) are more tangible and better than any artificial focus group!

Here are some pictures from the first day of SugarCon:

Andy Dreisch right before his first presentation:

Martin Schneider, during his American (Sugar) Idol Audition:

Hello friends! I’m here in my boss Andy Dreisch’s presentation, during the first breakout session of SugarCon. Andy’s presentation walks through seven upgrade-safe, executive-proof customizations that use the Studio, Module Builder, workflows, reports, and other built-in tools. So far he’s ticking off the checklist pretty quickly. We’ve got a scenario based on American Idol, and later on our singing marketeer Martin Schneider will entertain the crowd as Andy adds a custom module. Talk about a multi-media extravaganza!

Our grand finale was going to be an audience participation bit where the crowd would text message a “rating” on Martin’s performance, which would instantly show up in the newly created Sugar module. What a spectacular finish! However, we were dismayed to learn this morning that there’s no cell phone access in this room! We’re thirty feet underground in a technological cave.

So, Julian’s come to the rescue and we’re going to mimic the SMS data. We also have runners stationed at the back of the room who will sprint up the stairs to a less-dead cell spot. This should be fun!

We’re jamming here today at Sugar HQ, putting the final touches on our presentations and tying up the last of the details for our big gathering next Wednesday.

One of the most useful things we’re doing (besides the plethora of presentations) is an “Ask the Experts” kiosk that will be running throughout the entire convention. We’re staffing the booth with experts from our Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, and Online teams, so you can talk shop with them about your toughest coding and implementation challenges.

Look for the kiosk in the  vendor showcase area at SugarCon from Wednesday to Friday during the day. Exact hours and schedule will be posted at the start of the show.

Manoj from Product Management posted a forum post asking for your input on a fairly major decision we’re mulling over here in SugarLand.  We are considering making PHP 5.1 the minimum supported platform for Sugar, starting with Sugar 5.1. This would mean that all customers and community members running Sugar 5.1 or higher would have to move to PHP 5.1 or greater.

Please weigh in on this discussion. We’re planning on making the final decision in just a few days. Thank you in advance for your opinions!

Check out this forum thread that talks about how to extend the User page in an upgrade-safe way.

We’re very happy to announce that we have passed our 4 millionth download from SugarForge.org! We had announced a contest in a previous blog, and we have combed through the entries to determine a winner. Congratulations go to Xavier Rigal, whose guess came closest to the actual date and time (which was Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 10:01 AM if you’re curious).

Now does anyone want to predict when we’ll hit 5 million downloads?