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:

   • 6.x => 7.x module upgrade guide
   • 6.x => 7.x theme upgrade guide

   ...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.

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:

• File and image handling in core
• Translatable Fields
• Various D7UX improvements
• Various API improvements
• Clean-ups to the theme system
• Important groundwork for Drupal distributions
• Plugin manager (automated module/theme updates) in core
• Tons of misc. API-changing clean-ups and features that would make D7 even more awesome.

So, if your patch:

- is against documentation or user-facing strings (stuff in t())
- adds tests
- fixes bugs, in a way that does not change APIs (function xxx() lines, db schema, etc.)
- is minor coding standards clean-up
- doesn't affect the XHTML output of Drupal

...then please consider not pinging me about it in IRC for the next 10 days so that I can focus time and energy on some of these bigger, scarier patches that must get in before 9/1. After code freeze, I am very happy to look at those other kinds of patches! :) Until then, consider helping out in one of these areas, or check http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core and http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=API+change for others.

My sanity thanks you. :)