[development] Announcing DRUPAL-7-0-UNSTABLE-4

[Angela Byron]

Greetings, devel list!

Due to holidays, conferences, illnesses, and such, it's been about two  
months since our last unstable release. So, upon mysteriously finding  
myself some time tonight, I figured now was as good a time as any to  
roll the next one. :)

Here's a summary of some of the changes that seemed to stick out while  
reading the UNSTABLE-3 => UNSTABLE-4 changelog. I've attached the  
output of /contributions/tricks/cvs-release-notes.php to this mail  
(hopefully it makes it through to the list). See http://drupal.org/node/224333#UNSTABLE-4 
  for the full list of API changes this release.

Once again, I encourage contributors to usehttp://groups.drupal.org/patch-spotlight 
  as a place to organize, prioritize, and coordinate on patches they'd  
like to see in Drupal 7. Keep up the great work, folks!

For developers:
===============
- RDF goodness! An RDF namespace registry (and core now is XHTML 1.1  
compliant as a result). I don't really know what an RDF namespace  
registry means, but Dries is excited about it. ;)

- All of our hook documentation is now embedded in Drupal core files.  
This means it is easily searchable without access to api.drupal.org,  
You can enter "hook_something_something" in an IDE and have it auto- 
fill, AND it means that we will no longer have any hook introduced  
into Drupal without corresponding documentation. Hooray!

- There were several patches committed that are bringing consistency  
to our table naming conventions: blocks -> block, filters -> filter,  
etc. This is an enabler for interesting Data API things.

- Speaking of the database, HOOK_DB_REWRITE_SQL() IS DEAD. Long live  
hook_query_alter(), which gives you an actual *query object* instead  
of a fricking *string* that you have to parse with regex! :P Hooray!

- Various "plumbing" improvements to systems like SimpleTest (which  
got way faster and also had some bug fixes), DBTNG (which got bug  
fixes, subquery support, improved test coverage, various conversion  
patches, etc.), File API (tests, tests, and more tests, all of which  
fixed underlying bugs), and so on.

- Node links and comments were moved into $node->content['links'] and  
$node->content['comments'], respectively. This will make them a lot  
easier to theme.

- Performance improvements to the module system, bootstrap, etc. and  
the addition of functions such as node_load_multiple() and  
file_load_multiple() which allow you to save approximately oodles of  
queries by retrieving all of the objects you need at once rather than  
one at a time.

For users:
==========
- Users can now (if given permissions) cancel their own accounts. So  
endeth the oldest issue in the issue queue. Sniff. ;)

- Permissions page now displays human-readable names, in addition to  
descriptions.

- Improvements have been made to Aggregator module which allow  
pluggable feed fetchers, parsers, and processors.

- SQLite database support, which, among other things, opens up  
interesting possibilities for a "LiveCD"-like distribution of Drupal  
that requires no installer.

- A PostgreSQL "surge" has brought us pretty close to "true"  
PostgreSQL  database support (for real this time - we even have two  
maintainers!).

- The "Display post information" options have been moved from the  
theme settings (where no one on earth ever thinks to look) to the  
content type settings (where they do).

- A new "Clear all logs" button which lets you delete all watchdog  
data without having to dork around in the database.

- A new module dependency system which magically figures out what  
order to enable modules when you check off a bunch of them that are  
inter-dependent so you don't get ugly "function does not exist" fatal  
errors. Yay, math!

-Angie
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20090115/6f31ba6e/attachment-0002.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20090115/6f31ba6e/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20090115/6f31ba6e/attachment-0003.htm