By dries on

In preparation of the Drupal 4.7.0 release, development of Drupal core will be frozen on September 1st. As of September 1st, the focus is to strengthen the code base's performance, usability and stability. As we progress, focus will shift towards stability and near the end of the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed, until no release critical bugs are left. After the code freeze, it will take several weeks before Drupal 4.7.0 can be released, however, one or more release candidates will be made available during the code freeze.

Read on for more information about the current status of the forthcoming Drupal 4.7 release.

Completed

The following changes are already in CVS HEAD and will be part of Drupal 4.7.

  • Improved edit forms (auto-complete forms and collapsible page elements)
  • Support for free tagging (folksonomies)
  • Site-wide contact form
  • PHPTemplate as default template engine
  • Improved menu system integration (menu_otf module)
  • Added Docbook and OPML export functionality to books
  • Replaced the XML-RPC library by a better one
  • Improved Unicode string handling API
  • Various usability improvements
  • Various performance improvements
  • ...

Work in progress

The following key features are currently being worked on and need careful testing and code reviews before they can get committed. With your help, we hope to include them in Drupal 4.7.

The following key features are actively being worked on but are not ready for testing. Nonetheless, we hope to include them in Drupal 4.7.

  • Improved form handling (Adrian et al.)
  • Usability improvements (Kieran et al.)
  • Upgrade system improvements (Neil et al.)
  • Ability to theme administration pages differently
  • ...

Note that these lists are not complete: more patches can and will make it into Drupal 4.7. Check the Drupal project issues to track all ongoing activities.

Comments

hatseflats’s picture

hatseflats commented

What's the status on that, i hoped this would be included in 4.7 too.

jvandyk’s picture

jvandyk commented

I had wished to be a lot further along on CCK than I am, though it has come along far enough for a demo in Portland last week.

The good news is, the improved form handling mentioned above solves a whole dimension of CCK, so the job is now smaller.

At this point I would look for CCK in a post-4.7 release.

Scott’s picture

Scott commented

[rave] I am convinced that CCK is going to make Drupal the ultimate web application development platform "for the masses"! It will significantly reduce the amount of add-on modules and custom coding needed to create Drupal sites with information architectures that are rich, complex, and well integrated. [/rave]

Thanks, jvandyk, for keeping it going, and jonbob for the vision...

Is there a way the rest of us could see your demo?

Since it could be several months before CCK goes into core, could there be a stable release of CCK as a contrib module in the meantime?

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

People are going to eat CCK for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Where is JonBob these days?

- Robert Douglass

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jaharmi’s picture

jaharmi commented

I'm sure we'll get it when it's ready, and given that Manila would have been a much shallower CMS without John's Metadata plugin, I fully expect Drupal to rock much more with CCK.

Now, if I only had an easier way to migrate all of my thousands of stories out of Manila and into Drupal …

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robertb9527’s picture

robertb9527 commented

Gooooood! I love drupal!

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Sage-1’s picture

Sage-1 commented

I know someone was working on getting Daylight Savings Time implemented... please please please tell me it'll make it into 4.7.0! It's the only thing that's really missing from Drupal, as far as I'm concerned.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

You too can help getting it in by testing it:
http://drupal.org/node/11077

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Sage-1’s picture

Sage-1 commented

After reading through the comments on that patch, I am confused. It is not clear if that patch has ever been updated or if it is being superseded by CrunchyWelch's work, or what... it also isn't clear whether I need to install Drupal from CVS to apply that patch, or if I can test it with 4.6.3 ...

Killes, could you maybe set up some page that gives us a current status and some instructions for testing and providing feedback? I really want to help out but I'm very confused.

IamPter’s picture

IamPter commented

As a new user of Drupal I am preplexed by the lack (maybe my understanding) of the ability to have a block with a menu system consisting of content I have created. Or am I missing something?

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

Yeah, you are missing something. Especially the topic of this thread.
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IamPter’s picture

IamPter commented

I was wondering if this was in the Drupal 4.7 feature set.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

You can already do that since Drupal 3.0 through a custom php block. No need to bloat the code base.
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code rader’s picture

code rader commented

I think what you are looking for is menu_otf (on the fly). It is a new part of 4.6 that allows you to setup a menu to specific pages that you have created. I have found it very useful and I think it is what you are talking about.

I'm glad to see it is making its way into the core for 4.7.

Jeff Rader
http;//lubtex.com/OS/

Jeff Rader

capmex’s picture

capmex commented

It's good to see that a relatively new module will get into core. For me menu_otf is a time saver.

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sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

I do not believe that menu_otf will be going into core. I think that was a suggestion.

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matt westgate’s picture

matt westgate commented

Menu_otf was integrated into menu module for core. If you enable menu module, you now get the menu_otf functionality too. Details are here.

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

Did you try the sitemenu module? There are also other variants in contrib, like taxonomy_dhtml, taxonomy context, taxonomy menu, ...etc.

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cantastorie’s picture

cantastorie commented

I thought it was planned to integrate internationalization module (and patch) in the drupal core. Or I was wrong?

plj’s picture

plj commented

Include it. So that those who need i18n and extra taxonomy functionality wouldn't need to do doublepatch tricks like this.

Or even better, inlude taxonomy_access.module too. Drupal's default permissions management options are way too limited.

merlinofchaos’s picture

merlinofchaos commented

taxonomy_access has interaction issues. I would only recommend including it with *extensive* testing to make sure it doesn't break things. I don't really like the sheer volume of records-per-node that taxonomy_access creates, and have been trying to think of a cleaner way to do what taxonomy_access does, tho I'm not yet familiar enough with Drupal to do so.

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kje’s picture

kje commented

It is a unique proposition against other CMS. Thank you for the great work.

jose reyero’s picture

jose reyero commented

We only have two patches in queue that are really needed to run i18n without further patching:

http://drupal.org/node/29030 (first chx's version)
http://drupal.org/node/16452

https://reyero.net

luigi12’s picture

luigi12 commented

please, please internationalization!

tostinni’s picture

tostinni commented

the 2 patches Jose was waiting for have been commited, so i18n should work fine with 4.7.

luigi12’s picture

luigi12 commented

thank you for the very good news!

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

You should know that everyone wants Drupal to be as feature rich as possible and the only thing holding any particular feature back from being included (besides possibly not belonging in core), is the quality of the code and how well it's been tested. So what can you do? Go test the patches and provide feedback:

http://drupal.org/patchbingo

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kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

And if you are not into patches, but want to fix bugs, or help reproduce them, test them, and verify them , then you can play Bug Bingo.

Try it! It is very interesting and addictive, just like the games you play!

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tostinni’s picture

tostinni commented

Thanks guys ;) It's a good way to encourage us finding them.

Gabriel R.’s picture

Gabriel R. commented

Yes, it IS fun! Yay!

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gerhard killesreiter’s picture

gerhard killesreiter commented

for some reason, the aliases have been changed to

http://drupal.org/patch-bingo
and
http://drupal.org/bug-bingo

Don't stop playing, it's free!

iraszl’s picture

iraszl commented

You guys rock!

One wish: I hope image.module will be in core with better editorial functions. Upload, align, borders, etc. Most Drupal sites use images in posts. It's not user friendly now. I'm ready to do some GUI design, but don't know any coding...

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Steven’s picture

Steven commented

You can add borders and such with a dash of CSS, or if you really want advanced looks, overriding the default image output in the theme. It's a purely presentational aspect, not something to bother with when you're actually uploading them.

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Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented

wishes must go here: http://drupal.org/node/add/project_issue/drupal/feature

But search first! REmember: a feature request in itself is useless, you need code, mockups, writups etc with it
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drofnar’s picture

drofnar commented

I’d like to propose that Drupal gets more serious with tags. Tags are one of the hottest things of 2005. BBC, Yahoo, Infoworld and Nature publishing (connotea) are just some of the biggest names to adopt their usage.

Drupal currently has the folksonomy module and the awtags module. However neither of these are yet offering an internal tag capability equivalent to the best standards for tagging.

Awtags does seem to cover most base requirements for tagging quite well. However there are still some features not implemented which I suggest are important for a good/serious tagging capability beyond the basics:

First, All tags must have RSS feed (almost a basic reqmt actually – which awtags does provide)

-Apply microformats/microcontent standards, eg xfolk (which allows users to own their tags independent of drupal)
-Searching combinations (intersections) of tags, and allowing drill down through increasing levels (combinations of tags)
-Well designed data model so that large tag sets can be browsed as above efficiently and speedily.
-Ability to browse by user tags instead of all tags (other than your own)
-Ability to browse groups of users tags (eg an Organic Group where you browse the combination of group members tags),
-Ability to browse tag sets for specific nodetypes or groups (eg only nodes belonging to group or only forum nodes etc.
-Export tags to other tag systems like delicious etc (xfolf would resolve this) – per user – not just the whole sites tags)

What would make Drupal tagging standout head and shoulders above any other tagging system would be the ability to leverage the drupal network of drupal community sites, so that a drupal user in one site can decide to browse not just his tags, or his groups tags or another users tags in his community, but to be able to browse across drupal sites that have made them open to this (just like common drupal IDs, common drupal tags). So they could selct search Drupal network tags, (then get a set of options based on the network of drupal sites tags available for aggregation. Eg he may get the following options: Browse ALL tags from across the drupal network of drupal sites, just search drupal site X, or X,Y and Z, include/exclude sX,Y or Z sites.

Why is this valuable? Because its allowing wider and broader collaborative collections to be browsed whilst still allowing browsing of controlled sets of tags (the advantage of a closed drupal tag community over the totally open global tags of say delicious or yahoo.) eg searching tags across ngo type sites would provide a richer set of collaborative tags (yet still with a more ngo flavoured focus). If the userids were carried across also and associated with tags then browsing this way would also open up great social discovery and networking out of the tag information.

Finally, I propose that Drupal base its tagging system on another opensource collaborative project. Im not aware of all the options. Ive heard of delirious, Scuttle (both incorporate xfolk microformat) Ive heard that Nature publishings connotea is open source. One that seems very straightforward to leverage is Freetag by Gordon Luk, which has been disigned to plugin easily with LAMP systems. Though it doesn’t yet do the full set of features mentioned. It is going in the right direction, is used at upcoming.org as well as others and is planning on a distributed model (ie network of sites using the Freetag system). Most important of all would be the value gained from collaborating with another open source community, one that is focussed specifically on the tag capabilities and can bring the specific knowledge of what matters in this area. For example till now our own drupal community has currently seen the “tag cloud’ visualization as something important, whilst in tag communities , this feature wouldn’t have a very high priority compared to other issues such as drill down capabilities, scalability, performance and distributed site tag search and social features that allow tags searching to leverage social network features as well as helping build social networks.

The FreeTag project the site can be seen at

http://www.getluky.net/freetag/

Gordon Luk’s Freetag for PHP 4 is designed to be easily plugged into systems just like Drupal.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

The CVS (4.7) freetagging by Morbus Iff is pretty good. Have you tried it?

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drofnar’s picture

drofnar commented

maybe this was the wrong place to post that, if so I apologise. I have now posted that as a feature request over at

http://drupal.org/node/29467

attached the implementation guide and a php class file which reveals the basic way the freetag system does its stuff.

goncalo.dumas’s picture

goncalo.dumas commented

How can someone test this pre-pre-release candidate?

I tried to browse the CVS in search of version 4.7.0 but found nothing.

cheers
goncalo.dumas

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

http://drupal.org/node/28245

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goncalo.dumas’s picture

goncalo.dumas commented

Thanks!

goncalo.dumas’s picture

goncalo.dumas commented

I’ve managed to get the 4.7.0 CVS working and let me tell you; I’m amazed by the improvements made to this, already winning CMS, version 4.6.3.

I’m currently working on a revision of the Portuguese (PORTUGAL) translation, so I’ll have to postpone the testing of this yet developing version.

But as soon as a finish translating, I’ll be glad to help tracking any bugs the 4.7.0 eventually has.

By the way! Are there many new texts that have to be translated?

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

There were not too many changes to the texts - yet. I expect there will be quite a few changes in the "usability improvement" phase. I especially hope that the long admin texts will be shortened a bit and/or split up into seperate paragraphs
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aries’s picture

aries commented

I think this announcement is abbadoned. I'd like to see a much more detailed tracking. It can be useful for contributors too!
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