[development] Announcing DRUPAL-7-0-UNSTABLE-1

[Angela Byron]

Please see http://drupal.org/node/311949 for back-story.

Summary:
"Unstable" releases are going to be periodic (probably bi-weekly-ish or 
as otherwise needed) "snap-shots" of what's in HEAD, intended for 
pre-alpha testers who want to provide very preliminary feedback, core 
developers rolling "epic" HEAD patches who want something that doesn't 
change every hour to roll against, and/or contributed module developers 
who want to get the jump on porting their modules against something 
that's not a constantly moving target. Drupal 7 is currently being 
developed heavily, and what is in these unstable releases bears very 
little resemblance to what the final release of Drupal 7 will look like; 
this is merely a tool for contributors to do their work more efficiently.

Please note that these are called "unstable" releases for a reason. They 
are intended for developers only, or testers comfortable with things 
randomly exploding in their face. Do NOT upgrade your production sites 
to unstable releases. Do NOT expect APIs to remain frozen in any way 
between unstable releases until code freeze. I'm not going to even 
include instructions on how to get it, because honestly, if you can't 
figure it out, you really shouldn't be using it. ;)

Now, that said, here's a summary of things that are included in 
UNSTABLE-1. For the full list, see 
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/CHANGELOG.txt?revision=1.280&view=markup&pathrev=DRUPAL-7-0-UNSTABLE-1 
which I will try to make a point of actually remembering to update next 
time I roll an unstable release. :P

For developers:
===============
- SimpleTest module, an automated code tester, is now in core, along 
with a bazillion tests. These (should) now all pass, so you can use this 
as a guideline to know whether your patches / modules have broken 
anything. See documentation at http://drupal.org/simpletest. 
http://acquia.com/files/test-results/index.html for an idea of how our 
overall test coverage is coming along.

- A completely new database API, known as "Database: The Next 
Generation" (DBTNG). This involves a lot of changes, so please see the 
docs at http://drupal.org/node/310069.

- A "code registry" which is a set of database tables holding all of the 
functions in all of the modules, allowing files to be lazy-loaded. This 
requires changes to your .info files. See 
http://drupal.org/node/224333#registry for more details.

- WYSIWYG editors now have a hope and prayer of integrating with 
textareas given the new #input_format property on textareas.

- Image toolkits can now be supplied by modules. This is nice, so you 
don't have to do awkward copying of 'image.imagemagick.inc' into the 
includes folder.

For users:
==========
- Core now offers two install profiles: a basic one that sets up stuff 
like an "Article" and "Page" content type, some Taxonomy vocabularies, 
etc. The installer requirements check also got a nice makeover and looks 
more like the status report page.

- Removed several modules and extraneous features: Throttle module's 
gone, Ping module's gone, access rules are gone, that horrible wall of 
comment settings is gone, etc.

- Added drag-and-drop to a bunch of areas (poll results, languages, 
etc.) that missed them in D6.

- Permissions now have descriptions, and node permissions are now sorted 
by content type rather than by verb.

Known Bugs:
===========
Plenty, but the most critical one is that you can't currently upgrade 
6.x => 7.x: http://drupal.org/node/303889. Actually, I suppose this 
could also be considered a "feature" of unstable releases, depending on 
your point of view. ;)

Over the next couple weeks, let's continue to hammer on 
http://groups.drupal.org/patch-spotlight and try and have some new 
exciting patches in for UNSTABLE-2. :)

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