Kjartan Mannes

Having spent quite a bit of time reviewing and setting up the test site for the new Drupal release system I figured it was time to actually test it out and see how it works.

To aide me in my testing I decided to make a few branches and tags on the notify module, of course all the testing was done on the test site (http://scratch.drupal.org/) so we didn't break anything for the real notify module maintainers.

Garland (formerly Themetastic) is actually a very cool theme. The fact that you can change the color scheme of the site is very cool. Steven has setup a test site so everyone can experiment with the new toys before they are added to Drupal. So go play around and post your favorite color schemes to possibly have them included!

I found a couple of minor bugs while playing around, but they should all be gone before the theme gets committed to Drupal.

IRC statistics

Yes, they are back! :)

• #drupal
• #drupal-support

Meaningless fun, but they are sometimes rather interesting :)

Other stuff

I happened to be peaking at my web server logs and noticed that the second most frequent web search term used to end up on Dries' website is Joomla. The most frequent search term is of course Drupal.

After getting back into Drupal 5.0 development, I have spent a lot of time ranting about how I find the most recent version of Form API hard to work with. People keep asking me what is "wrong and what to do about it. So far, I have not actually been able to articulate what really bugs me, overall it is just a feeling that I am constantly fighting the API and not creating code.

Having spent some time thinking about it, I think I am starting to get an idea of what bugs me.

List of issues I'm keeping an eye on:

Incorporate node access arbitrator into node.module

Move around the UI to rebuild node_access, and makes it possible for other modules to call the rebuild function automatically so users dont have to manually do it. I think everyone involved in the patch is happy with the latest patch so probably no much work left here beyond getting it committed.

Add version info to modules page

Waiting for the new project release system to see if can automate including the version info for contrib modules.

make releases real nodes

Keeping an eye on this to test it more fully once the code is closer to complete. Not really interested in the releases being nodes aspect as I am of the new versioning system for contrib modules that will be added along with it. Opens up a few new options.

Just needed to note this down so I can keep track of it all. Trying not to get heavily involved in more than 5 issues at any given time for now, no reason to try and tackle too much at once. Besides the issues I'm playing around with:

• Disecting the Forms API. I've pretty much understood how it works now, but I really want to go through the functions and pull them appart to master it. Going to try to document the more interesting things, but no real promises on that.
• Updating some of the simpler contrib modules that are in use on drupal.org. Its a nice way to get a handle on the latest changes. Some modules seem to require little work, others are more complex due to fapi changes.
• Trying to spec up some new features for 6.0-dev that require core changes. Still in the what-if-we-did-this phase, but once it gets beyond that I'll post an update.