The April Washington, DC Drupal meetup is happening tonight at 7:00 pm at Stetsons.

There are two interesting lightning talks on the schedule so far:

• Will White will give a short demo of the new beta 9 release of Managing News, a news and data aggregator that’s being used to track news on topics ranging from reports from aid workers abroad to the World Cup. This release is just coming out today so this will be one of the first looks at it, and it will include new features like a customizable dashboard and new widgets.

• Jeff Miccolis will talk about the new Boxes module, which is a reimplementation of the custom blocks that the core block module provides. He’ll explain what Boxes does, why it is useful, how it works with blocks, and how it is different from Panels.

There’s room for more talks too, so if you’d like to present on a Drupal related topic, go for it and post about in the comments over in the Washington DC Drupal group.

We know a lot of people are headed out to San Francisco for DrupalCon soon, and it will be great to catch up with everyone before the conference! You can find more details about the meetup here, and I hope to see you tonight!