drupal 7

Background

These days, my life is all migrations, all the time, which means I often need to run Drupal 7 and Drupal 9 sites side-by-side simultaneously to compare the results.

The problem?

The latest version of Drush, Drush 10, only works on Drupal versions 8.4+. To use Drush on Drupal 7 sites, you need an older version, Drush 8. And both of them use the command drush. Tricksy...

There are various Drupal-knowledgeable local development environments, such as Acquia Dev Desktop, Lando, DDEV, and Drupal VM that handle this complexity for you, which is super handy. However, the rest of my team uses a "from scratch" local development environment on Mac OS X, so I needed to figure out how to do this by hand.

I made a Twitter inquiry if there was an existing tutorial on how to do this, and since I couldn't find one, here it is. :) Hopefully this helps others, as well! (Thanks to those who responded, pointing me in the right direction!)

Some folks noticed that as of Wednesday's release, we went from 7.4 -> 7.7 and are a bit confused about what's going on, as well as why these releases happened in such rapid succession, so soon after the 7.4 release. Here's the skinny:

• As of Drupal 7.1/Drupal 6.21, Drupal core does monthly releases. This was a new policy the core team discussed and implemented back in May, which lays out a schedule of the last Wednesday of the month for new core releases.

  This policy change has helped tremendously to provide predicability for Drupal site maintainers so they don't need to fret every Wednesday about "what if" a new core release comes out, it's helped to ensure timely fixing of security issues, and also has encouraged a general "swarming" around bug fixes in a timely manner to ensure they make the next release deadline.

  The monthly rate will likely slow down as D7 continues to mature, but for now it's really helping to provide focus on working through some of the backlog and getting contributed module blockers unstuck.

• When security releases are required, we create two releases. One which has only the security patches, and one that has the security patches, plus all the bug fixes to date.

  Why do such a silly thing, you might ask? Because it's *really* important that security fixes get rolled out pronto, whereas the bug fix releases might conceivably need more testing to make sure they don't create any adverse effects in your environment. So we offer Drupal 7.5 for those who want only the quick fix, and Drupal 7.6 for the whole shebang.

  This graphic by Gábor Hojtsy, included on all release announcements, lays it out rather simply in flowchart form.

• Drupal 7.6 was accidentally rolled incorrectly, hence 7.7. The only difference between 7.7 and 7.6 is literally a one line fix to the VERSION number in bootstrap.inc (ok, fine, technically 3 lines because of CHANGELOG.txt ;P). I blame being holed up sick in a hotel room with a stomach flu for missing the git commit between vi bootstrap.inc and git tag. Sorry about that. :(

  Thankfully, some helpful friends are helping to work on some automation tools for the process so that doesn't happen again. :)

Hope that helps clarify things!

Back around the time of the Drupal 7 code freeze, Moshe Weitzman proposed the #D7CX (Drupal 7 Contrib Experience) movement. Developers were encouraged to add a #D7CX pledge to their project pages, indicating that they would port their contributed modules and themes to Drupal 7 by the time Drupal 7 was released.

Here is some data to measure the impact that this movement had, relative to Drupal 6, as well as some recommended next steps to help us complete the work that #D7CX started.

Pursuant to the new predicatably scheduled point releases of core policy, just a heads-up that there will be a new point release of Drupal 7 this Wednesday, June 29.

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.