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.

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. Among the improvements are a revamped UI, a testing framework, a new database abstraction layer, a browser-based upgrade system for contributed modules and themes, and CCK in core.

Now it's time to head into the final stretch: stomping down the list of critical bugs, so that we can release Drupal 7.0 out into the world! :D

To help this along, Dries and I will create the first alpha release of Drupal 7 on January 15, 2010, Drupal's ninth birthday. For developers working on Drupal 7 clean-ups, particularly around anything that is touching APIs or the UI in a fundamental way, your changes will need to be completed by then. Once the alpha is released, we will start to treat Drupal 7 as an actual stable release, which means nothing but non-API-breaking bug fixes.

The initial brainstorming at Drupalcon just a few weeks after development opened for Drupal 7 was instrumental in laying a strong foundation for the entire release, I would love to see Drupal 8 get the same opportunity. However, this means releasing Drupal 7 before Drupalcon SF (mid-April), so that our attention is not divided between getting our past efforts out into the world, and deciding what our future efforts will be.

And when does Drupal 7 come out? When the list of critical issues hits zero (currently at 340, though this will fluctuate all over the place for awhile as non-critical issues are marked such as and new critical issues are found). To spook you with a little math, if we want to see a Drupal 7.0 release by the end of March, at the current total we need to solve roughly 120 issues per month, or 30 issues per week, or 5 per day. Yipes! :)

Obviously, the more people we have helping out with fixing critical issues, the faster this number will go down. So if you haven't yet played around with Drupal 7, now's a great time to start! Pick a critical bug that looks interesting/achievable, and take the opportunity to learn a bit about the changes in Drupal 7 at the same time while you solve it. There are always folks in #drupal and #drupal-contribute on irc.freenode.net to help you, and there are a variety of bugs for all skill levels and areas of expertise.

Let's rock!

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:

• Usability team critical issues
• Issues important to solve by UX freeze
• Administrative overlays patch
• D7UX issues
• Updating core help texts to new standard

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! :)

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

I wanted to upload a copy of my slides from the Drupal 7 Status Update talk at Drupalcon Paris, and then I realized I don't think I ever uploaded my slides from the Drupal 7 Status Update talk at Drupalcon DC. Oops! So here are both of them. ;)

Drupalcon DC (March 4, 2009)

• slides (PDF, 13.6 MB)
• video

Drupalcon Paris (September 2, 2009)

• slides (PDF, 12.2 MB)
• video

You can think of these basically as an audiovisual guide to the highlights of the Drupal 7 CHANGELOG.txt and release notes. It's interesting to compare where we thought we'd go in March and where we ended up in September. Someday I'm sure I'll have lots of time to write something really navel-gazing and insightful about those 6 months in between, but alas, today is not that day. ;)

In terms of "What next?" Dries just made a post to the Drupal.org front page on the Drupal 7 release cycle which you can find at http://drupal.org/node/578446. It details the schedule for the next coming phases, and I posted some follow-ups with some action items for those hoping to help us towards release!

Hope to see you in the issue queue! :)

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. :)