Drupal 7 code freeze: status update and next steps
It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.
First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay (see screenshot). Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.
Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.
My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!
Great work! I'm looking forward to the advancements of D7!
October 30, 2009 - 23:06Great news! :)
However, now that the dust settled a bit, I had the chance for a first more in-depth look into Field API and especially the field modules (text/number/options/etc), and, putting my contrib developer and site builder hat back on, I am highly, no, massively worried about the state of them, and more importantly, how I am gonna be supposed to build something useful out of that.
I know you and Angie will say - boy, we had 18 MONTHS + 6 WEEKS to do something about it! - but, well, I only found out this late about the shocking state of those implementations. By no means I want to insult anyone - we just did what was necessary to make it work in core. But the current state of the code, especially the field modules, requires maximum in-depth understanding of a multitude of sub-systems to allow anyone to remotely understand what's going on internally, and more importantly, how one is going to be able to properly customize, extend, or alter the default behavior.
I'm specifically talking about things like
Very concerning stuff like that.
Basically, it still boils down to the D7 API clean-up issue tag queue, which I'm still maintaining. I've already removed most of the issues that aren't totally critical. A whole bunch of issues in there was RTBC a long time ago already, so those "technically" do not count (would be great to finally kick them out of the list though ;).
So, uhm, yeah - it would be very nice to know whether we can do something about that and what we can do - ideally, before I continue to (potentially) waste countless of even more working hours on those patches. I'm not really sure how site builders (like me) will work around some of those issues if not, but yeah...
Since I already try to provide a very concise target for very critical stuff with this issue list - perhaps you & Angie could just talk about it and afterwards, remove the "D7 API clean-up" tag from those issues you consider not as critical as I do?
Thanks!
October 31, 2009 - 02:30sun
Thanks for the helpful overview. Let's discuss these issues on a case per case basis in the issue queue. Some of these could be considered critical bugs ... I'll discuss them with Angie.
October 31, 2009 - 18:18Such a shame that "allowing user profiles to use the field API" didn't make it in. This is one of those features that I was really looking forward to. It's so hard to know what to work on at last minute.
- Sean Bannister
November 1, 2009 - 09:25Good we have another two weeks to work on some of the more important UX related issues.
For those wanting to jump in on them, a prioritized list of UX issues is here: http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core/usability
November 2, 2009 - 00:08Dries,
Congratulations, you have shown how open source and enterprise can, not only coexist, but complement each other seamlessly. I'm a Joomla user / developer; and although I like Joomla API (i.e.: MVC and OOP), I dont think the Joomla project is positioning itself in a competitive position for its developers. One critic that I make to the Joomla Core Team is that the same team that creates the core, also develops other extensions for sale. Isn't that disturbing, things like tagging and commenting should be part of the core. This is relevant here because the correct approach to generate income from your open-source project is the way Acquia did it.
Anyway, I want to give Drupal another try. Should I wait until D7 is out? Will the API be considerably different? If it will, then I rather take the learning curve for D7 and not for D6. Anyway, your feedback is appreciated. Although I know you must be very busy. Thanks.
Luis
November 2, 2009 - 02:59Luis, jump into Drupal as someone who was a Joomla user and got frustrated with it. Drupal was amazing - although D7 looks alot more intuitive to when I started with it D5 was my first real look at it.
D4 scared me at the time, looked too complex.
November 6, 2009 - 21:08Great news! I can't wait to see it launched. I can provide the grounds for the screen-casts about D7 if you'll have screen-casts and would like to do this.
November 12, 2009 - 12:03Post new comment