Drupal

Early in 2007, I was discussing the possibility of being the Drupal 6 maintainer with Dries. Dries was just collecting candidates at that time and it was not for some months after work on Drupal 6 started, that he selected me as a maintainer. Through the discussions, we reiterated the point multiple times, that core maintainership requires a significant dedication and time from the maintainer. I never thought I will be able to work this much on Drupal 6 though.

In mid-April, when Dries announced me as the selected core committer, I was still at university, completing my MSc thesis, and that my thesis was focused on internationalization features for Drupal 6 helped my involvement a great deal. It was a perfect match. Then after finishing university, I went on to work in Google Summer of Code 2007, where my application was accepted earlier. In part, I continued the multilanguage improvements for Drupal 6 (with localization advancements) and taken over Localization Server from Bruno Massa to take it to new heights and eventually make it an official tool for Drupal translators.

A few hours after I blogged about graduating, I was approached by Dries and Jay Batson to work for Acquia full time as a Drupal core developer. Being an open source contributor for at least 7 years, I was amazed by the possibility. While it was a lifetime opportunity for me, Drupal 6 benefited most with this offer. I have been working on Drupal 6 full time after finishing Google Summer of Code, right from the next business day, August 21st (months before Acquia was even announced).

I just checked out the data about the volume of my involvement in Drupal 6, and it is fantastic to see that how this all made possible to enable the community to contribute with a higher pace then ever. My commits reflect all your combined work, multiple contributors working on each improvement or fix to Drupal 6. If Acquia's priority would not be to contribute to Drupal 6 and help me enable the improvements and fixes to land in core, we would not be here with a release of this quality in this timeframe. The difference between the parts of this commit graph when I was working on Drupal 6 in my spare time and full time really shows the difference.

So while there are lots of thanks coming my way, let me pass on some to Acquia. Let's meet in the Drupal 7 issue queue as well, we have fun stuff to do in the next release as well!

Just one week before DrupalCon Boston, some well known faces from the Drupal community will gather in Brussels, to host a Drupal Developer Room as part of the FOSDEM conference.

On February 24, Sunday, the developer room offers a great program with well known names. Talks include "What's new in Drupal 6" by Dries and myself, Drupal theming, usability and integration with web services and the ApacheSolr project, the Asset module, Drupal and MySQL high availability, just to name a few.

FOSDEM offers a great program otherwise as well, with Andrei Zmievski talking about Unicoding in PHP 6, Mark Finkle talking about Mozilla Prism (desktop web apps!) and Rogan Dawes talking about OWASP WebScarab-NG (HTTPS interception), just to name a few of my picks.

Let's meet there!

What can a Drupal 6 maintainer do, if he would like to gain more confidence that Drupal 6 is indeed fine and ready for a 6.0 stable release? Well, pick a well used site and upgrade. This is what I started to prepare for this Monday night for drupal.hu, the Hungarian Drupal community site. It helped that we readied the Hungarian translation earlier, so that it was complete and ready to import.

Many of you know that I am employed by Acquia to work on Drupal 6 full time right now, but since Drupal 6 is nearing a release, you might have wondered what I am going to work on next.

One of the rules with Drupal.org hosted projects is to not introduce radical API changes (or depending on your understanding even new features) in point releases of stable branches of contributed modules, so you are supposed to open a new branch. The hell starts to break loose however, if you don't have an eye on what is actually happening in your branches. This happened to me and it affected the Drupal 6 translation efforts so it was just the right time yesterday to finally clean it up. Here's the story.

Several people asked me to post about the status of the localization server, so here it goes. This project was started originally by Bruno Massa, then picked up by me as part of Google Summer of Code 2007 aiming to replace the Gettext and CVS based workflow for translators, providing a fully web based translation interface. One of the cool things of working full time on Drupal at Acquia is that I have capacity for spare time developments like this one. That's great.

The news is out! The spring DrupalCon in 2008 (these spring events usually being in North America) will be in Boston! While the session program is still in the planning, one slightly hidden announcement is the conference logo contest posted: http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/logoDesignContest The page contains all the important details, the most important being that the deadline is January 25, 2008. Quite close, right?

Through the development of the Localization Server project, I decided that it is important that we use icons instead of boring text links especially that we need to communicate lots of different things and provide action buttons for multiple options in a small space.

We do not (yet?) have a graphics artist to help out here, so it turned out that whatever icon set we choose, there will be some problem with the icons size, the exact set of icons available, their color, and so on. So it occured to me that we have a huge set of symbols already in the Unicode character set which Drupal is using, so why not use those as icons?

GMail's labels, Mint's Peppermill site and others already use a trick to wrap a few tags with specific margins to get a rounded cornered button feel, and putting a Unicode symbol in as text makes for a useful button. It is definitely not as perfect as specially tailored icons, but it allows for a few neat things. Let's see...

Drupal 6 comes with a refined interface in many regards, and some of the things I love about this upcoming release are the more subtle changes. Here is a list of some changes in Drupal 6 which I think will be important but might need some time for previous users to accomodate to:

I implemented some touch ups to the design of the Drupal.hu site recently, and although Edit Illyés (one of the top contributors in our local community) noticed that something is not right in Internet Explorer 6, we did not have a chance to look into it for some time. So finally, this became my opportunity to grab and test IEs4OSX, the brother of IEs4Linux.

Part of my Dock with IE6

Thankfully, there are people, who agree that Internet Explorer testing should not require a full virtual machine running with all the Microsoft Windows operating system booted up, let alone a completely different machine with this OS installed. IEs4OSX allows users to use the Darwine (Wine for OSX) system to run Internet Explorer versions from 5.0 to 7.0. Although the 7.0 version is still admittedly in beta stage. It run fine for me on Ubuntu with IEs4Linux, but my Mac runs on high CPU loads with it, and no page load ever finishes.

After all, this fine project (and some CSS modifications) saved Drupal.hu from going with the broken layout for IE6 users through the holidays.