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I struggled for quite awhile trying to come up with a single woman to pay homage to this year for Ada Lovelace Day and in the end, I couldn't do it; there are just too darn many women in the Drupal community out there kicking ass! :D So instead, here's a tribute to several of the Drupalchix who are actively working to make Drupal 7 the most amazing release yet.

If you've tried to import a Drupal database dump with the cache table data still intact, you've probably at one point or another run into a "max_allowed_packet" error coming from MySQL. An easy way to address this is to increase the setting in my.cnf.

Drupal 7 first opened for development back in February 2008. At Drupalcon Boston a month later, we brainstormed on how to tackle some of Drupal's toughest challenges: our usability was not up to par, we were burning time fixing the same bugs over and over, our database abstraction layer suffered many limitations, upgrades were a nightmare, and critical modules such as CCK not being ported were harming our adoption rates of Drupal 6. Drupal 7 has made tremendous strides since then to solve each of these problems, as well as many others.

Short version: Extension until Monday to work on feature exception patches. GO! :D

As Dries mentioned in his Drupal 7 code freeze post, yesterday (October 15, 2009) marked the end of the period of development known as "Code Slush": a time to focus on API clean-ups and the list of 10 feature exceptions identified at Drupalcon Paris. Major APIs in Drupal 7 should now be considered frozen, barring critical bug fixes, so contributed module authors should be able to start porting modules to fulfill their D7CX pledges.

A number of great API clean-ups made it in during the 6-week extension, as well as many of the feature exceptions. Here's where we currently stand:

1. Image Field: DONE!
2. Translatable fields: API changes: DONE! (UI still outstanding)
3. Convert Profile module to Field API: Stalled. :(
4. Convert Taxonomy module to Field API: DONE!
5. Admin overlays: Very close!
6. Edit anywhere: Very close! DONE!
7. Customizable shortcut bar: Very close! DONE!
8. Administrative dashboard DONE!
9. Plugin Manager (automated module updates): DONE!
10. RDF: Making good progress DONE!

There are still 5 2 exceptions outstanding, but most of them are very close. As a result, Dries and I have decided to extend the deadline for feature exceptions only until Monday, October, 19, 2009. After that, there will be a post to the drupal.org front page on the next steps in the march toward Drupal 7's release.

I also want to extend a sincere thank-you to the core contributors who have done such a major push during code slush to get Drupal 7 into an even better place than it was September 1. There was a tremendous effort, particularly over the past 7-10 days, on features and functionality that will propel Drupal 7 to the stratosphere of awesomeness. Hopefully next week we can all catch up on a bit of sleep. :D

Dear Drupal community: I love you dearly, and I would love to look at all of your patches! However, we're down to the wire here trying to work hard on several very important initiatives over the next ten days, including: