webchick.net

very helpful lioness

All hands on deck for Drupal 7 alpha 1 this Friday!

Sun, 01/10/2010 - 01:28 -- webchick

Greetings, folks!

As you may or may not have heard, on Friday we are going to roll Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1. This will be the very first time that the vast majority of the community (not to mention the outside world) will download Drupal 7, and play around with all of the hard work you've all been doing for the past ~24 months. So! I would love to do everything that we can to really shine it up over the next couple of days.

There are three queues that I would love people to focus on if they have even one hour this week sometime to help Drupal 7:

  1. webchick's D7 alpha hit list:

    A variety of either seriously critical bugs (lingering critical API breakages, the broken upgrade path, missing security updates) or really glaring user-facing bugs that just make D7 look really sloppy. Some of these are real head-scratchers, but others I think are pretty obvious things that can be fixed in just a few lines of code.

    We will still release the alpha regardless of the state of this list on Friday, but progress here will help determine how many bold, flashing disclaimers I can remove from the announcement. ;)

    (Note that this is called webchick's D7 alpha hit list. Please do not add/remove stuff to/from this tag. If you feel something is drastically amiss, come find me on IRC and we can talk about it.)

  2. API changes lacking documentation list:
    Another thing that I'm really hoping to see along with the release of alpha 1, is a torrent of developers beginning to make good on their #D7CX pledges, by porting their modules and themes to Drupal 7. Right now, however, there are two pages of issues whose API changes are not documented in either the modules or theme upgrade guide. This is an extremely critical situation that we need to resolve ASAP in order to not stall the updates of 6.x modules to 7.x. (We all remember how much fun that 5.x -> 6.x lag was, don't we?)

    If you choose to help with this (bless you!), please both edit the appropriate handbook page(s) for the change:

    ...and also cross-file issues into the Coder module queue (http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/coder) against the "Upgrade Routines" component.

    Helping whittle this queue down not only will give me fewer gray hairs and make the D7 alpha 1 launch a huge success, but it will also help get you acclimated to the changes forthcoming in Drupal 7 now so that you are prepared when D7 is officially released in a few months. Plus, you can make a mean living with your brand new "Drupal 6 to 7 module/theme porting" business. ;)

    (Incidentally, I highly encourage the Drupal 8 maintainer to create a "Wall of Shame" for developers whose patches end up on this list for longer than 24 hours. ;))

  3. User interface text:

    The docs and usability teams are doing one final pass on all of the strings in core before we turn the translators loose on Friday. A lot of these require no more skill to review than the ability to read English. :)

Thank you all SO much in advance for your help, folks! Let's blow 'em all out of the water! :)

P.S.: I am probably going to be doing a "commit freeze" starting Wednesday night when I go to bed, in order to give 24 hours or so for any follow-up bugs to be shaken out prior to rolling the release, so we don't accidentally break something horribly in the final hours. GULP.

Comments

Submitted by Mark (not verified) on

Still uploading hundreds of core 6 mods for a site I'm making. But I will install core 7 too, just curious & to experiment !

Maybe somewhere in March -after the reasonable bug-free 7 release- all the energy and time can be directed towards a central planned mods integration and update proyect. So many mods, some even only working for core 5, or even 4 only. Revising ALL THE EXISTING mods and assign them to new integrated mods; like sometimes four old mods can be integrated into one new. Or 10-30 old mods can be changed for a basic API, an additional API and three additional integrated modules? Something like that.

Ehh, yes; almost forget core 8 development untill 2011...? Maybe a mod integration first is even better for the 8 development. After combining and streamlining all the mods, the picture might be clearer what better can be tranfered to core 8.

Submitted by Garrett Albright (not verified) on

Mark, Webchick and the other core developers are just that - core developers. They don't have anything to do with updating any of Drupal's non-core modules; that's the responsibility of the respective developers that created those modules.

Thanks to you and all the community for this hard work. I already see some presentation of D7 and it seem really GREAT !

I will try it myself very soon.

----

Merci à toi et à toute la communauté pour ce dur travail. J'ai déjà vu quelques présentations de Drupal 7 et cela semble vraiment génial !

J'espère avoir le temps d'essayer moi-même D7 très prochainement.

;-)

Awesome to hear. I am tweeting this stuff now, especially the links for D7 theme and module changes reference.

Any additional text I can add or edit better would be my pleasure.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Never happened. You people at drupal are so fucking useless I can't even believe it. Updating the main site ALWAYS gets postponed too. WTF man, you suck shit lesbo

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The inside of your mind seems like a terrible place to be stuck. I wish you luck.

Submitted by Wahiaronkwas (not verified) on

I'm a newbie, but I'll do what I can.

Ignore the negative coward.

Submitted by Genny Engel (not verified) on

Whee-hee-heeeee!! Just happen to have a couple of handy testing platforms and a weekend coming up ... let's play :)

:s unfortunately, the first feed back I got from the alpha 1 release was "I can't install it!" turns out its broken on PostgreSQL. Fortunately, HEAD is fixed already and the next release will be fine (fingers crossed!)

So, I'm disappointed to see that Drupal 7 still has that glaringly startlingly red "you messed up, dummy" error on the 3rd step of the installation process. Can't there be a better way of expressing this other than a red box with a red X? It reads like an error, as if it were the user's fault. I mocked this up in the D7 Flickr group. This should be yellow, not red, or conveyed differently.