Drupal 7

Affinity Bridge's Katherine Bailey and Tom Nightingale gave an awesome introduction to the Search API module at the recent Vancouver Drupal User Group's meeting.

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CivicActions has been working with Google's “Make the Web Faster” project team to make some (last minute) improvements that make Drupal 7 faster.

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Time is flying by. There is now only 7 weeks to go to DrupalCon San Francisco! I'm really looking forward to it I have to admit. Although I've visited the US a fair bit, I've never been to the west coast, not to mind say San Francisco. Dermot is coming over with me this time, and we're planning on taking an extra week to travel around and do some sightseeing. We're also going to visit a good friend of mine, Aimee, in LA, and then travel back up to Sacremento to visit other friends.

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With the D7UC Initiative gaining steam and excepting brainstorming ideas, I figured it was a good time to map out my idea for Ubercart and CiviCRM integration. I realize that many may cringe at the mention of uniting these two applications, for all their complexities, yet I see it as critically important for many non profit organizations, and I'll explain why.

Many organizations that I have worked with want to take in money in two ways via the web:

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Drupal 7 code freeze is almost upon us, and you may now be considering upgrading your modules and themes. To make that process as easy as possible, I've been working hard to update the Coder module with all the necessary Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 reviews to help you identify where in your module or theme you need to make changes.

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WebEnabled is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) hosted platform that "makes it easy for teams to focus on building awesome web applications." Provisioning applications from their library is fast. Bevan reported getting a Drupal 7 instance up and running in a few minutes. The service offers full SSH, SCP and SFTP access. You can also manage your code revisions and collaborate with others using SVN.

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A couple of weeks ago I did some comparison benchmarks between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. They showed that for most requests in Drupal 7, we've reduced the number of database queries issued significantly, but we're spending a lot more time in PHP. So good and bad news.

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Vertical tabs are finally in Drupal core!

Screenshot of vertical tabs on an 'Article Edit' page in Drupal 7.

A week ago Angie "webchick" Byron committed a large patch from #323112 Vertical Tabs to Drupal 7 core. This change is quite possibly the most significant usability enhancement to Drupal 7 to date. Two of the three formal usability tests did usability testing with vertical tabs and reported positively.

Screenshot of a 'Story Edit' page in Drupal 6, before vertical tabs.

UPDATE: Rob Loach has created a patch to implement vertical tabs on the node-type form.

UPDATE: See other issues about vertical tabs in Drupal core .

What is more interesting about this however, is the process, time and effort that it took to get this change into Drupal core. It all started over a year ago, well before DrupalCon Boston 2008 even before Drupal 6 had a stable release. The discussion around part of that patch goes back as far as November 2007! Along the way countless people have been involved in many discussions, worked on heaps of mockups, lots of prototypes, and loads of code.

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