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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:

With huge thanks to Sarah Cruise from dyke it, here's the video and slides for the Women in Open Source talk at Open Web Vancouver 2009 a month or so ago.

View Slides (16 MB PDF)
Download Video (195 MB FLV)

If you've seen the old version of that talk, the content is fairly similar, but some additional tweaking, so it might be worth checking out. Like always, there's a new horror story (and of course this debacle happened the very next day *sigh*), and at the end there is a new section called "Myth Busters" that's an attempt to shatter misconceptions that a lot of would-be open source contributors have that make them think they're not "good enough" to participate. (I know, because I was one of those myself for about a decade.) The discussion at the end is also pretty fun, esp. for the Drupal crowd. ;)

I wanted to sincerely thank the organizers of Open Web Vancouver (esp. Malcolm Van Deist and Jeff Griffiths) for having me. The conference was absolutely awesome: a wonderful mix of technology, important social and political issues, and genuinely interesting people to talk to.

It was also great to re-connect with old Drupal friends. Made me all nostalgic for my very first Drupalcon back in 2006 that completely changed my life. :') Aw!! Thanks too for all the great recommendations that have come in for "Operation: Show Marci How Awesome Vancouver Is." 18 days to go... DUN DUN DUNNNN... Keep those suggestions coming if you have them. :)

Open Source Business Resource (OSBR), a free monthly online journal aimed at business owners, company executives and employees, and participants in the open source community, just published an issue centered around Women in Open Source.