Hm. Trying this again. I sent this Wednesday night but apparently it
didn't make it?
---
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 <strong>instrumental</strong> 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 <em>before</em> 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 [1]
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!
[1] http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?
version
[0
]=
156281
&status
[0
]=
1
&status
[1
]=
8
&status
[2]=13&status[3]=14&priorities[0]=1&categories[0]=bug&categories[1]=task
