Bonsoir, devel list! It's been a *stupidly* long time since our last interim Drupal 7 unstable release. Sorry about that! I'm going to go ahead and blame this on taxes. And traveling. And a general lack of delicious ice cream in my freezer. It's a tragedy, really. But the *good* news is that DRUPAL-7-0-UNSTABLE-7 is jam packed full of awesomeness! That's right! JAM packed! The complete commit log is attached. There's also a full list of API changes in UNSTABLE-7 at http://drupal.org/node/224333#UNSTABLE-7 We are just about at the *three-month mark* until code freeze. That means the time to make your wildest Drupal dreams come true is RIGHT NOW. Check out the Drupal core initiatives page at http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core to see what folks are tackling now if you're looking for a place to jump in. Or, feel free to add your own! Ok. Here we go! Changes for developers: ======================= - A spangly new Job Queue API which allows for batch processing of items. See http://api.drupal.org/api/group/queue/7 for more info. - Some nice performance improvements: o SimpleTest module no longer has to instantiate every test class in order to simply read its metadata. $memory_usage--; o There's now a taxonomy_vocabulary_load_multiple(), user_delete_multiple() to improve performance around massive amounts of these types of data. o Drupal now serves more sensible headrs for reverse proxies. o Core now defaults to using MySQL's InnoDB storage engine rather than MyISAM. - A new centralized static caching mechanism, so we don't need to litter $reset parameters all over the dang place. - New hooks hook_node_access_records_alter() and hook_node_grants_alter() to allow for complex interactions between multiple node access modules. - Field API improvements, including a pluggable storage mechanism, increased test coverage, and de-coupling from Form API. - Lots of DBTNG conversions. Less than 10 more to go! http://bit.ly/DBTNG_Conversion Yeehaw!! - Tests for OpenID module. We actually got a lot of tests, but these were *extra* awesome (and sorely needed), so I wanted to mention them specially here. ;) Changes for themers: ==================== - There are now nice extra body classes added to match a page's template suggestions. So for example node/1/edit would give you classes of page-node, page-node-edit, and page-node-1. The Zen theme offers this too in Drupal 6. - box.tpl.php is DEAD. DEAD, my friends! In its place are far more sensible theme_comment_form_box() and theme_search_results_listing(). That's right. There was absolutely nothing about box.tpl.php that had anything to do with block.module. Go figure. - A whole gaggle of formerly "special" things are now just regular old blocks. Footer message, feature-specific help text, mission statement, and even $content! This means they can be more precisely positioned and have the same configurable visibility as other blocks in the system. Changes for users: ================== - Those tired and ugly collapsed fieldsets on the node form have now become nice looking and useful Vertical Tabs! See http://buytaert.net/drupal-7-usability-update for a screeshot. - The horrible frankenstein "dumping ground of random crap" monster that is the default "Navigation" menu has now been split up into: o User menu: Contains "My account" and "Logout" links. This is positioned in the upper-right corner. o Management menu: Contains "Add new content" (formerly "Create content") and "Administer" links. Think of this as the "do stuff" menu. o Navigation menu: The same as before, but now at least with fewer links! :D - There's a slick new input format selector. Goodbye, 3-foot long collapsed fieldset with radios showing every godforsaken option known to mankind, hello compact, JS-ified select box! - There's a new top-level "International" administration menu for any localization/translation-related modules to put their stuff and a "Development" administration menu for developer tools. - On the permissions page, permissions checked for authenticated users will auto-check the same permissions for all other roles on the client side. This helps make it more obvious to people what checking that box actually does. - Removed Clean URL choice from installer. Seriously, are you ever going to opt *not* to have Clean URLs? If so, there's a settings page for that. :P - Some security improvements: o A watchdog event is now fired whenever modules are enabled/ disabled. o PHP module is now the "global killswitch" for whether users can use PHP anywhere in the system. Catch you next month, Drupalistas! :D -Angie