Cyrve

We are close, folks.

It will take a monumental effort, but I think we can close all critical D7 issues by end of Drupalcon Copenhagen.

We sprinted in Boston all day yesterday and managed to close 5 criticals, and make good progress on 5-8 more. It was exhausting and exhilirating work. It required concession and cooperation from everyone involved.

And thats mainly what we need now. We need folks to Get Real, Get Dirty, and Give up (on perfection). We are in the 'least of all evils' stage. Easy resolutions are unavailable. All software ships with bugs, and sometimes serious ones.

It has been 2.5 years since Drupal 6. Time to push this baby out.

Are you using drush in an interesting or innovative way? Does your development team integrate drush into its workflow? Got any interesting custom commands? Post a comment telling me about it. I'm gathering topics for my Advanced Drush session in Copenhagen.

I was excited to see today that Acquia finally released Drupal Commons, their Drupal distribution for social networking sites. This is pretty welcome news; Acquia's engineering ninjas and product management ninjas can add a lot of spit and polish to this languishing part of Drupal.

I'm especially interested in the set of Contrib modules that Acquia chose to deliver social networking. The Darwinian survival of Contrib modules is endlessly fascinating. Will they use activity stream or heartbeat, user relationships or flag, notifications/messaging or subscriptions? A vote of confidence from Acquia can make the difference between a module surviving or perishing.

So, I quickly downloaded the code and dove into the /profiles directory. Here are all the modules that Acquia includes in the distro ...

Cyrve recently finished a giant data migration for examiner.com. Some of our methodology and tips are documented in Acquia's new case study. Have a look if you are staring at an upcoming data migration :).

Also, three cheers for Drupal 7, which powers the upcoming examiner.com web site. D7 is ready for use, if your team has some talent and patience. The payoff is enormous.

As many know, Drupal 7 will be released once all its critical issues are resolved (currently 150).

I propose that we ask the the folks listed in MAINTAINERS.txt to more actively work down the issues in their respective components. Further, we start holding weekly IRC meetings with these maintainers. In these meetings, hear progress reports and discuss sticky cross-component issues. Transcripts from these meetings would be publicly accessible. I'm OK with ditching the meeting and just doing public progress reports if folks prefer that.

The criticals queue has been culled already. The 150 remaining issues are real, and non trivial. Bazaar like good-will won't get us to the finish line in a timely manner IMO. Just a dash of professionalism will really help here.

If you think you belong in this meeting but aren't in MAINTAINERS.txt, then submit a patch that adds yourself to MAINTAINERS.

Naturally, we need to do some pre-work in order to map MAINTAINERS to issue queue components.

webchick is managing the Drupal 7 release. I've offered myself as a facilitator for this piece of the process should she be interested.

Lastly, I'd like to congratulate all the #D7CX module/theme maintainers. Check out the stunning number of D7 releases!

The query log feature of devel.module has faithfully served us since 2002, relatively unchanged. Since then, the web learned about AJAX and now devel for Drupal 7 finally gets with the times.

In the ops column of the screenshot above, you will see three ajax links titled P, A, E. Those stand for Placeholders, Arguments, and EXPLAIN. They work as follows:

• Placeholders. This is the default presentation of a query. Here we see SQL with placeholders instead of values. This is the most compact representation.
• Arguments. This link retrieves the same SQL replaces placeholders with actual values. This presentation is helpful for debugging and for copy/paste into you mysql editor for optimization.
• EXPLAIN. This link shows the EXPLAIN output for the query. This is super helpful for optimizing any slow query.

Also, The far right column is helpful for knowing which slave server actually executed a given query (master/slave is a new feature of D7).

One of my goals here is to help module maintainers to upgrade and optimize their modules. Go #D7CX. Devel is well along in its pledge having released Alpha-1

Cyrve has been negligent in blogging about our work on the Economist.com data migration. The data migration and more are discussed in this CMSWire article. The article is based on Rob and Moshe's presentation at the recent Do It With Drupal conference. If you are interested in how an established, popular site moves to Drupal, you'll enjoy this piece.

We finally posted our case study of the Genomeweb data migration and site build to the home page of Drupal.org. We hope it informs and educates new Druapl site builders about how we handled the more technically interesting parts of the project.

Also of note, is the GIVEBACK section at the end of the case study. There, we itemize all of the code and other contributions that we gave back to the Drupal community as a result of the project. I hope this becomes a standard feature of similar case studies and blog posts. Let's keep promoting the open source ethos as the project grows.

I’ve been working on transitioning some of my Drupal responsibilities to worthy successors. I’ve been contributing to Drupal since 2001. I’ve picked up some cruft along with way :). More importantly, its really important to encourage the next generation of Drupal leaders. Making a name for yourself in Drupal is a little harder than it used to be. many of the obvious modules are well established. We need to look out for the motivated and talented newcomers and keep them moving up. They need opportunities to help our project grow. Also, I’ve lost some interest in some of my earlier projects. I think it is better to hand them over smoothly than to let them wither away.

With that mind, here are some recent changes in my world ...

Exactly one year ago at the beloved Szeged Drupalcon, we held a terrific Birds of Feather session about node access control in Drupal. We listed all our griefs and wishes on a whiteboard. We then proceeded to make action items and assign them to developers. The minutes from the BoF are posted to the Access Control group.

This week, we finally checked off the last item. Drupal 7 contains every enhancement and fix that we envisioned. Bravo to Ken Rickard, Dave Cohen, Larry Garfield, Mike Wacker, and everyone who helped.

FWIW, this model of assigning real tasks to real people worked well for us. I hope some other groups do the same in Paris. Action items are not just for suits :)