2011 has so far been a pretty amazing year, both for me personally, and also for the larger Drupal project. After nearly three years of hard work Drupal 7.0 was released, Lullabot sent me on tour to teach people about it, Drupal.org’s CVS => Git migration launched, and Drupal’s 10th birthday was celebrated at the amazing DrupalCon Chicago, where my mug was plastered on the cover of Linux Journal and Drupal 8 development officially kicked off. Whew!
http://groups.drupal.org/node/114264 contains very important information that affects everyone who currently contributes or plans to contribute code to Drupal.org post-Git migration.
The Git migration team is urgently looking for feedback on this proposal from as many contributors as possible, so please ponder it over the holidays and chime in with your thoughts.
(Comments disabled here, because you should be commenting over there :))
For those who aren't aware, today here at BADCamp, Drupal 7 at long last reached 0 critical issues! YAY!!!
We also released Drupal 7.0 beta 3. Why beta3 and not rc1? Please click the link for more details. :) (Spoiler: We wanted to leave room for one last hash through the "majors" queue and pre-string freeze clean-up)
So if you're a core subsystem maintainer, please try and find some time in the next day or so to triage your issue queue and make sure that we're not sitting on any release blockers we don't know about yet. Drupal 7 RC1 represents an "everything freeze", and is imminent.
Here is a copy of my slides + video from my talk at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit on the Drupal community, how to get involved, and where we're going.
The general topic is about how and why to get involved in the Drupal community, and it includes some simple things literally anyone can do to help the project, some "myth busting" around the Drupal community and open source in general, and tips and tricks on how to ensure you're contributing in an effective way.
Angela Byron: The Drupal Community from Carlson Media on Vimeo.
Slides: drupal-community-pnwds-2010-10-02.pdf (PDF, 19MB)
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.
Update: Drupal.org is going Git!
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.
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.
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.
This weekend, Nov. 21 and 22, we'll be having a virtual usability sprint on IRC to help churn through some patches and reviews to push in important usability improvements by UX freeze (12/1). We'll be focusing on the following areas:
Drop by #drupal-usability #drupal-contribute on irc.freenode.net whenever you're around this weekend, and whoever is active will help you find something interesting to work on! Coder hands and patch reviewers are especially needed, but feel free to drop by regardless of skill level. It should be a fun time, and you're guaranteed to learn a lot! :)
And if usability ain't your thing, there are always accessibility and performance issues that could use your help! :)
