[development] Announcing DRUPAL-7-0-UNSTABLE-5

[Angela Byron]

Helllooooo, devel list!

It's that time of the month again! (No, not THAT time of the month,  
silly... the time when we roll an interim unstable release of Drupal 7  
to keep people abreast of what's happening!)

Below are some of highlights from UNSTABLE-4 => UNSTABLE-5. For those  
who like way too much information, I've also attached a copy of the  
full output from cvs-release-notes.tpl.php showing all commits. http://drupal.org/node/224333#UNSTABLE-5 
  has the details of contributed module developer-facing changes.

Note: Patch Spotlight has once again been "upgraded" and is now part  
of the "Community Initiatives" handbook. I think I'm finally done  
moving it around now. :P~ Please check out http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core 
  for important places to jump in, or to add your own itch that you're  
interested in helping to scratch!

So, without further ado, here's a summary of what's been going on the  
last month:

For developers:
===============
* The biggest news of course is we now have a fabulous Field API in  
core! HOORAY! While there is still work to do, the initial patch and  
several follow-ups went in, which allows fields to be attached to both  
users and nodes. If you're interested in helping with this, please see http://drupal.org/node/361849 
  for a "jump off" point.

* Another big, exciting development is hook_page_alter(). Page  
callbacks now return drupal_render()able arrays, which modules can  
then modify before they are output. Some crazy, exciting stuff can be  
done here.

* Lots of documentation fixes/improvements: Thanks to the inclusion of  
API documentation in core, and thanks in part to our new "Novice" tag (http://drupal.org/patch/novice 
), we've had lots of undocumented hooks documented, unclear comments  
clarified, and incorrect docs corrected. Please keep those patches  
(and issues) coming!

* Comment and Taxonomy modules are now truly optional and can be  
uninstalled. In more radical news, *Block* module has also been made  
optional. OoOoOOo, scandalous. ;)

* Performance improvements, including adding the ability to disable  
anonymous sessions to help with the Digg/Slashdot effect, mammoth  
hook_form_alter()s have been broken up to use  
hook_form_FORM_ID_alter() instead, and stopping  
filter_xss_bad_protocol from being called hundreds of time on each  
page. There is definitely still some work to do, but we're getting  
there!

* Error handling has been improved. Core now uses E_ALL error  
reporting by default (which helps ensure squeaky-clean code), and  
changing its sensitivity can be done from a settings page instead of  
by hacking common.inc. ;)

* Nedjo organized a great virtual internationalization sprint, which  
resulted in fixing of several annoying bugs (locale uninstall being  
broken, all languages being active in language switcher block) and  
made important in-roads to more complex features that will hopefully  
be part of a future unstable release.

For users:
==========
* Locale interface has been **dramatically** improved. It now behaves  
a lot more like the watchdog or node content administration screens do.

* The vocabulary edit form has been also visually simplified by  
removing a bunch of needless fieldsets and the "weight" field. Ahhh...

* Lots of textual improvements, too. For example, "Input formats" are  
now "Text formats" which help better describe what they are for.

* There are snazzy new forum icons! Hooray!

* Administration theme has been moved from under site configuration  
where NO ONE ever finds it, to the bottom of the themes page where  
people actually might. ;)

Catch you next month, Drupalistas!

-Angie

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