Personal battle plans for next major Drupal version

I would really like to help in the area of usability. I would like to team up with someone (or a small team) to handle the coding because 1) my coding is a little shoddy, and 2) I find it difficult to fully drench myself in coding and user-friendlieness at the same time. I have a small (okay... rather large) laundry list of improvable areas and I'd love to come up with some elegant solutions. I'm happy to do a bunch of brainstorming and wireframe out the solutions if I can find a partner to handle the code. As a footnote, I'd love to consider how ajax-based solutions could help out in the admin areas.

Lullabot will also be sponsoring and otherwise contributing to a bunch of (generic Drupal) theme development over the coming months and I hope that some of these themes will make their way into the core distribution for an upcoming version. We're going to do all we can to spawn interest in getting some more design-centric people on board and making some kick-ass contributed themes to really show off Drupal's versatility.

--= Jeff Robbins | www.lullabot.com =--

I am going to be developing the dependency system and creating the mechanism for install profiles to be created.

--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

I *want* to rewrite taxonomy from the ground up. What I'm going to *do*, however, is try to get in a couple small improvements, such as documenting the existing API, giving the developer better access to the taxonomy form object, and making it possible to bypass taxonomy_get_tree when it isn't needed.

- Robert Douglass

-----
My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress

I've started work on a new module that generates breadcrumbs based on taxonomy and allows each breadcrumb to link to any node set up by the admin (including the default taxonomy/term pages). See http://drupal.org/node/57789 for more details. Look for something called taxonomy_breadcrumb in the near future. I've got a working prototype now and plan on putting something in cvs shortly.

My long term vision is to eventually have this type of functionality be part of the core taxonomy module. But for the near future, let's see how people like the module.

There are a few ideas for new modules that have been in my head for a while, and that I've been meaning to turn into real code. First on my list is a module to properly handle pages on a Drupal site that no longer exist. The main job of this module will be to issue either '301 - redirect to new page' responses, or '400 - page gone' responses. But I'd like it to include additional response types as well (and for the response type for each page to be manageable through a nice interface, etc).

Also on my list is a 'botstopper' module, to stop hits from search engine bots (and other non-human visitors) from messing up your statistics and page hit counters. I'd love to incorporate some kind of 'intelligent' logic that allows this module to recognise and learn new bots.

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh

I expect to work on a unified loggin mechanism within drupal, to minimize code duplication, and ease modules access to logged information.

This is something that touches various parts of core, though, so I'm not sure it will work out to be completely doable in just one grand change. I've outlined the basic vision of this Logging for Drupal battle plan, explaining the why and how as I see them.

I am going to continue to learn the Drupal way. Help out in the forums and IRC. Support ecommerce with patches and testing. And try and build up the network of local Developers and Administrators in Australia.

I'll be working on VotingAPI, polishing the API up, and building on its integration with other APIs like views and actions. I'd also like to work with other module developers who want to use it, making sure that the API is as clean and efficient as possible.

I'm also going to be working on building out the webcomic module, which is in a 'usable but bare-bones' state right now. Drupal has tons of features that are must-haves for webcomic authors, and I'd love to see it take that niche by storm. I'll probably be poking my nose into the File API and Relationships working groups over on groups.drupal.org, too, as there's a high degreee of overlap with those projects and what I want to do with the module.

As far as core is concerned, I want to press to get my BlogAPI patch ready for prime time, so that modules can better integrate with it. Many blog clients have a 'keywork' field, but we don't use its data, for example. Trackback URLs, 'music I'm currently listening to,' and so on map very well do Drupal's node system, but we discard the data at present.

--
Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion

Sympal Scripts: putting Drupal on rails

I want to continue developing my Sympal scripts.

They are my attempt to get some of the Ruby on Rails development-shazam into Drupal. I do not believe in graphical installers, nor in click-n-point-coding. What I want, are small commandline tools, that create sites for you, install code for you. Generate modules and views, fill the database with install profiles and more of such niceness. Make sure there are unit-tests available, and allow 3rd party tools like plesk, or apt-get etc) to hook into the site-management. Note that I wish to keep this out of Core, so forgive me, if it should not have been here.

In more detail:
Install profiles are almost in place, and next in line is automated testing pre-built into all the site-generators. Another Thing I am working on, is auto-installation of modules and themes, by checking out code from Drupals CVS. And last, hope to get started on integrating auto-generated tests, for all the auto-generated modules. I am also investigating the possibilities of tying this to a single one_ring.module, which would allow you to use one Drupal site, to manage all the other Drupal sites. However, this /is/ a wish, and Will probably not make it for 4.8. There might even be time and resources to make all this into a real distribution, which will carry the slogan "A Drupal for developers, developers for the users".

Me and Drupal

Betterupload (aka complete overhaul of the upload/file handling), new theme system concepts, loads of contribs, and various patches, as well as themes.drupal.org are all under my name. However, I have made a decision to step back from Drupal, slowly, and not completely. So the mentioned projects, with exception of Sympal scripts, will be done when they are done :). Maybe not, maybe they will. Maybe someone with more time and plans can take them over, maybe not.
Fact remains that I want to be far less involved in Drupal. Drupal and I have grown away from eachother. My needs have shifted, and So has Drupal.I personally need other things then that Drupal can offer me, so Its time to look on.

For this reason I recently joined the Railfrog team, and maybe, or maybe not, it will prove an alternative for for me for Drupal, in future. For now, however, I see it more as a valuable addition to Drupal. So this does not mean that I will no longer use Drupal for any projects, nor that I will stop with the Drupal hosting plan, it simply means that I will spend less time "deeper down" in Drupal, and that I will be looking at Drupal from more of a distance.

Bèr
---
Professional | Personal
| Sympal: Development and Hosting

Hi Dries,

here's my things to do list for Drupal;

(a) maintain the front_page.module, worldpay.module and flexisearch.modules and monitor/address the support issues for those modules as best and as quickly as I can

(b) Continue to add/expand the new PHP TEMPLATE THEME SNIPPETS section of the handbook.

(c) Continue to help improve documentation and the Drupal handbook.

(d) Produce a theming companion book for designers & non programmers using Drupal, called Drupalicious - I opened up the idea to the community a while back and have a few volunteers and contributers already. Production is starting soon.

There are other ideas and would love to do more, but the above are manageable & realistic with the time I have available.

Dub

I'll make it my personal battle plan to improve the ping module.

My plan is to propose a new module and a set of patches to have i18n.module features and a few more somehow integrated into the core. Or at least to have specific support in core for this features, which is needed because otherwise you start needing too many hacks to get it working.

Some of them are:
- Multilingual nodes.
- Multilingual taxonomy
- Make every object translatable: menus, profiles, blocks, etc..
- Better integration with locale module

My idea, is to have in core the minimum needed and then some modules -that might be in core or not- adding more complex features, like translation workflows and that.

Currently -besides updating i18n module for 4.7- I'm working on a DEP to propose some clean implementation schema for all this features.

so, here's a short list of the things I'd like to get done for 4.8 (off the top of my pre-first-coffee head):

* Revamp the file API to be clearer & more useful. (more on this later)
* Really grow and expand the image suite of tools to finally solve that "images are hard" stigma
* Get more image handling stuff into core
* Get a revamped "dist auth" mechanism in core
* Introduce some "drupalized" general xml handling wrappers (parser & writer).
* Add a generalized feed parsing layer (i.e. an aggregator "api") and better feed generation (i.e. generalized node_feed).
* Make blogapi more extensible
* Fix more core bugs than I did for 4.7
* Buy an espresso machine

Hm, yeah that's a good start. Anyone placing bets on how much I get done? :)
--
James Walker :: Bryght Guy

I think I'd like to work on improved caching. The current way we do caches has a number of drawbacks, most important being that it doesn't work well with database caches. I would like to split up the monolithic cache table into several smaller tables (page, filter, menu, ...). The problem is that to prove the usefulness of this for Drupal core I'd need to have a test setup and a good test case which I don't have, so I am looking for collaborators. The actual code changes would be rather small.
--
Drupal services
My Drupal services

For the 4.8
My attention is focused on

• file management/file api
• cck/views development.

and I may decide to play with

• distributed trust and social networking systems.
• microcontent and sub-page caching.
• multimedia extensions and handlers.
• feeds and aggregation.
• banners and advertising related stuff.

I plan on helping more with the Danish translation as well as aiding with various bug fixes. (I might also get more involved with internationalisation and localisation in a more general sense, but Danish translation is all I can promise. :))
In relation to my personal website and a community website I'm running, I may likely end up trying to write some custom modules and/or themes which may or may not end up here - it is also likely that this would result in me helping a bit with other people's modules and/or themes. Time will tell.

Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen

The optimization of locale.module could use some TLC... on my personal site I noticed it's eating a lot of processing time, and sometimes repeatedly. So I plan to look into that the following months

(I guess with the big hill of path.module gone you notice the smaller speedbumps in the road)

For now, I'm going to continue using Drupal on any new web projects I start, including my hope-it'll-make-it-big yearbooks service ( http://www.allyearbooks.co.uk ). Because that website requires a lot of custom modules etc, some of those module may get contributed back eventually, and by developing such a big site I'll continue to help patch the core in my little way. I expect to make the biggest contribution in the areas of File API and Groups, particuarly geographical localization of groups.

I'll also try to contribute some more module after the success of my Nice Menus module.

I will also continue to help (and be helped!) in IRC and in the forums.

Jake
Drupal web services, London

It should probably go without saying, but I'm focusing on the Content Construction Kit. It is now in the wild as a contributed module, and I will be working on polishing it and soliciting feedback on what needs to happen to make it part of Drupal proper.

I will also be reviewing the developer documentation, and revising the API module along with providing patches to Doxygen comments as necessary to improve it.

I think with 4.7 we have a very, very solid base nailed down. Sure, Form API is still going new ways, but we've already covered quite a lot of ground.

That's why I want to focus on making Drupal look better. Not just good usability, but a nice interface around it. People say Joomla works and looks better, but that's just an impression. We all know Drupal has the cleanest, most flexible code around ;).

I'd like to keep working on the new default theme (Vancouver) working group, though I haven't had much time for that until now. I'd also like to look at how the administration section (revamped with the dashboard-alike work that is being done by CSL) can be made nicer and cleaner. And little details, like a good default styling of previews, can make the whole Drupal experience much nicer.

I'd also like to keep pushing in more nicer JS and Ajax features. For example, I think if we can find a clean and usable way to get expandable DHTML menus in, we should totally go for it. If we can get an Ajax preview going, that'd be great. Inline commenting, go for it.

Other than that, if a new area comes up where I can help, I'll be sure to lend a hand!
--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

(1) release my HTML scraper module (now in my sandbox)
(2) release node_import officially for 4.7 (now in process)
(3) enhance userreview module to have customizable voting criteria & widgits
(4) expand node_import into an API for transforming nodes into different node types
(5) release some modular thematic components I have developed
(6) create a sport league module
(7) create a board game module which delivers dynamic data to a static board game (enhanced scraper to run automatically)
(8) ehealth module (patients communicate w/ doctors, manage their health info)

thanks to all for hard work on 4.7
dado

• Mentoring SoC applicants. This will be my top priority during any "down-time" over the summer -- trying to foster in the "new generation" of Drupal developers and help out where I can.
• Writing and maintaining unit tests for Drupal core, I think the "everyone try this and see if it breaks anything" method we currently use for testing is less than ideal (some would say completely insane ;)). We have the SimpleTest module, but a lot of the tests (from what I understand) are out of date now since it kind of got dropped after SoC last year (through no fault of the students, really... the community was scrambling too much to get 4.7 out the door than to worry about reconfiguring development practices). I'll be following closely the progress of any students who decide to work on the testing automation suite in this year's SoC and try and help out where I can.
• Creating developer-oriented screencasts and tutorials. It's my new mission in life to get as many people involved in open source development, and especially for Drupal. ;) I want to try and document some common tasks such as patching, using CVS, setting up a local development environment, etc. so the developers of tomorrow can have an easier time.
• Get the quiz module working. Kind of sucks that only half the project got finished last year... ;( I tried for a long time to keep up with this but it's too hard to squeeze in 2 months' of another student's missing work into nights and weekends. :( I'll keep plugging away though and try and get it at least usable in 4.7, hopefully by the end of the summer so it can be used in conjunction with the new Gradebook app that's to be developed in this year's SoC.
• Re-think admin/help. I'd like to work with others in devising a way to pull admin/help text out of modules and have it load in modularly only when it's needed, and also fix the whole synching-Drupal.org-handbooks-with-admin/help issue.
• Fix signatures. Man, these drive me nuts! ;) I want to make it so that signautres are appended automatically (maybe some options about both in nodes and comments or just comments or just nodes) and not sitting there in the textbox when you reply. Ick! ;)
• Fix the welcome message. Another thing that drives me nuts is the way that silly welcome message works. I'd like to remove it from node.module and instead get it included in the database script (sounds easy, but there are translation issues and some other stuff to keep in mind here).
• (time permitting) Forum enhancements Last year, I wrote up a big long post comparing PHPBB's forum feature set to Drupal's. I'd like to work on closing some of the gaps here. Whether this ends up being a specific collection of modules or patches to core, I'm not sure.
• (time permitting) Database documentation. I'd like to once and for all work out a usable system of doing database documentation, including field- and table-level comments, so that we can auto-generate data dictionaries and E-R diagrams. Would be huge in terms of helping people get their heads around how the pieces of Drupal fit together.

Yeah that's probably enough to try and squeeze in a couple months. ;)

Love this topic.

LIKELY
- Organic groups module. See http://www.tejasa.com/node/112.
- Multi user chat rooms. Ajax front end and database back end. I'm looking for someone to hire to build this. Contact me if interested.
- If noone beats me to it, I'll probably have a stab at transforming profiles into CCK nodes.

MAYBE
- improving the block regions system so modules can define regions. Also get the main content and footer message to be blocks as well
- Display comments on own tab like Wikipedia
- Replacing distributed authentication with OpenID or other identity system
- Improve the Liquid wiki or otherwise improve our wiki offerrings

As webchick wrote up here the main thing that we/I plan to contribute back in the next 6 months or so is a lot of enhancements that further drupal's ability to serve as a framework for chapters. There is a lot more that can be done in this area and other people might have a slightly different vision but when we were talking about this stuff we tried to limit it to building blocks others can use instead of going for some grand design only useful to us.

============================================
BuyBlue.org

I am planning to work on this in the next several months. Good to know it is on someone's agenda too. Maybe we can team up.

I would like to work with a few people and will DO my best in the mean time to better integrate a shared database system so that users can share there postfix/mysql database setup with the drupal db and therefore create virtual domain logins but also a webmail system for drupal...............
now will someone shoot me for my insanity...

Along the lines of what Steven discussed, I've plan to focus on (and have begun) a suite of Javascipt tools for improving usability. My main interest is in enabling us to selectively load content without full page refreshes. I've roughed in a number of tools in the Javascript Tools package. All need a lot more work, and some are broken because I haven't yet updated them for the last Drupal changes before 4.7. That said, the following are coming together, and would benefit greatly from others wading in and improving (links are to the CVS repository):

ajaxsubmit: a behaviour attached to forms that makes them submit via AJAX and return just the status messages and, if appropriate, a preview. Status: basically works, lots of refining to do.

activemenu: attaches to menu items and adds tree menu behaviour, with new items loading through AJAX. Status: implemented, not working yet under clean URLs.

dynamicload: behaviour attached to a block or content area that makes links load into a designated block or the main content area. Status: basically working, not yet under clean URLs.

collapsiblock: behaviour attached to a block, makes it collapsible and sets an admin-defined default collapsed state, with collapsed state persisting across a user session

editinplace (the top item on my 'free up some time for this' list): users with edit permission get a new (dynamically rendered on client) local task tab, 'edit in place'. When activated, each editable area receives an 'edit' link, clickable to bring up an edit form for just that element (e.g., title), which when clicked issues an AJAX submit for just that datum. Status: idea stage. The key piece of work will be allowing in place editing of segments of content, e.g., each title (h1, h2, etc. tag content) and set of paragraphs. While easy on the client, this would require some fancy regular expressions on the server side to enable saving of specified portions.

toc: dynamically renders a clickable, collapsible table of contents for a node.

Here's what i'll be working on the next few months of my drupal development:

• Getting block visibility by role into core
  • Getting #18018 in shape to be committed to core
  • Providing a 4.7 work-around (either in the style of #49154, or as a separate contrib module if possible).
• Tons of improvements/fixes for the project module
  • Fixing bugs
  • Integration w/ organic groups
  • Better email support (ability to create and reply to issues via email -- possibly via mailhandler, possibly via another solution)
  • More flexible (don't require taxonomy, don't assume software projects)
  • Making project get release data from cvs, primarily so contrib modules can be tagged with official releases (both as version numbers and as CVS tags) instead of forcing everything in contrib to do date-based "releases".
• Book improvements
  • I hope to be able to work on extending the book module so that when you "add child page", the new page inherits all the metadata of the parent page (publishing options, access control, etc).
  • A way to recursively operate on a tree of book pages (e.g. to set access control on an entire book and all its nodes).
• Drupal.org maintainance
  • Helping killes lock down the contrib repository so that developers w/ contrib cvs access can only commit to (and tag) projects they own or projects where they've been added to a blessed "maintainters" list.
  • Any other CVS wisdom i can share to help stream-line drupal development.
• Event improvements
  • Fleshing out and hopefully implementing Unified support for managing relationships between users and events. Perhaps using CCK and FAPI 2.0 as Relationship API as the basis for how this should all work.
  • Helping efforts to make it easier to create events (date picker, '+' links in the calendar block, duplicating existing events, better event repeat stuff, etc).
• Poll improvements
  • Getting #51561 RTBC and committed
  • Helping the effort to move poll out of core and helping to maintain it if/when it leaves core.
• Continuing to maintain and improve the Extended user status change notifications module
  • Adding a feature to generate a 1-time password link whenever an account move from blocked to active, so that users of sites where admin approval is required never see a temporary password until the account is active and the password can be used.
  • Keeping the issue queue clean.
• Node revision efforts:
  • (Long term, probably not 4.8, but we'll see how much progress i make): Support for managing content revisions via a real RCS backend. See #50682. I'm interested in both using a revision control system to have more powerful support for managing the revisions of a site's content, but also to more seamlessly use drupal to display content that already lives in an RCS.
  • If not that, at least fixing #53012 such that you get the "Log message" field on any node edit form if the "Create new revision" box has been checked.

That's probably way too ambitious for the scope of this forum post, but i'll see how much of it i can accomplish... any offers of help or suggestions on any of these issues/topics is most welcome. The good news is that my day job (research staff for the Condor High-Throughput Computing project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) is finally interested in using drupal, so a lot of the above, especially all the project and book stuff, will probably be "sponsored" in some form.

- Reduce http://drupal.org/project/issues?projects=3060&versions=6487,10634,10412... to one page.
- Work on developer tools- API and devel modules.

I have work on some French translation of some modules before and go on!

Alexandre Racine

www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc

www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal

I'm currently working on an advanced User Search module for 4.6, allowing for conditional (AND/OR/NOT) searches on each profile field.

The next step is to port it to 4.7, which has some great new search hooks, and enable it to store searches - think Views for users, or Smart Playlists on iTunes with users instead of music.

Cortext Communications
Drupal Themes & Modules

I have 2 contrib-related items that have been sitting on my todo for a while that I plan on getting to now that 4.7 is out:

(1) Location: Tuning and cleaning up the location module to take advantage of the new forms API and providing more integration with other modules.

(2) SMS: Taking advantage of the SMSgateway module (http://drupal.org/node/34966) to provide support for other SMS service providers, but also by building another module on top of it that provides single person messaging and SMS broadcasts via lists (perhaps similar to the way the massmailer provides lists). Eventually, I'm shooting for an implementation that can allow for both the 'alert me on my phone' when such and such updates happen to the site as well as broadcast functionality for reminders of events. This will eventually be integrated with location-based searches. It's my personal dream to see this type of thing being used to organize a bunch of physical bodies in a real physical world meeting-place on short notice.

And hey, if anyone wants to pay me for it let me know! It might happen faster ;-)

Ankur Rishi
(CivicSpace)

this feature was first planned in amsterdam, and minus a few minor last minute tweaks, the code is finished and on display here. the basic idea is to eliminate most of the annoying 'confirm' screens in the delete cycle, and to immediately send all deleted items to a 'trashbin' where they can later be recovered if necessary. also, for node deletions, i've improved outside module's abilities to interject vital information about the deletion with the addition of conditional confirm screens.

please help to test this patch, as it is basically ready to go, having more than 30 revisions to it's name--and i'd like to get it in as soon as enough people have tested it solidly

I wrote up a basic need/plan in my blog.

Not sure how far I can get on my own (but I'll be plugging away and will contribute whatever I come up with), but I'll be needing to work on implementing a way to let users define audiences for their nodes by selecting other users (not Roles, not creating Organic Groups, just selecting whatever users they want on the fly). There will be some ajax goodness involved. For now, I'll put documentation in my wiki, but that can move to a better place if anyone wants to play.

Maybe this can be done by contributing to NA Arbitrator - not sure yet.

1) Improved User List Interface - I want to take what we did with the node filter interface on admin/content and add that to the user list page. Wouldn't it be cool if we could get a list of users in certain role and then perform a batch operation on them?

2) Improved Path Aliasing Interface - Trying to manage thousands of aliases is difficult just using paged result sets. I'd like to explore other ways of getting to this data easier.

3) More Videocasts - I have a stack of ideas for more videocasts I want to do for the community.

***
www.lullabot.com - making open source easy

My plan is simply to get under the hood a bit more and to learn how this whole machine works.

Then if I learn enough, to maybe contribute to upgrading a contrib module to 4.7 or something else fairly simple.

________________________
dave lange

Thanks to the great great work and inspiration from the Lullubot guys, we know that Drupal starts to evolve from a great Open Source CMS to an even greater Open Source Web Application Framework. More and more people now start setting up real and working Web 2.0 companies running Drupal as their underlying application framework and/or business logic system. New and promissing modules like CCK and Views offer extended functionality at the ease of a mouse click!

So, in the spirit of the great DrupalED, DrupalArts and other Drupal Specialty Sites, I'll try and set up DrupalApps.org, covering all aspects of using Drupal as a Web Application Framework and Business Logic System. This will be a place for anyone interested in using Drupal for B2B and B2C business which isn't necessarily based solely on the E-Commerce module.

Opening of DrupalApps.org will be announced soon, anyone interested in colaborate in this project just drop me a line.

Further Plans from my side for the 4.7 release: build web sites and web sites and web sites with it! ;-) We've come to using Drupal almost exclusively for anything we do on the Internet by now and just love its high flexibility and yet its ease in extending Drupal to whatever you can think of.

Major new and upcomming web sites built on Drupal 4.7 scheduled with us:

1. Relaunch of web site of major German food brand, including B2C and B2B areas
2. Relaunch of a small but very exclusive national Air Line carrier, including B2C and B2B areas
3. Extension and upgrade to 4.7 of the existing marketing web site www.cooking-cup.de
4. many other projects based on Drupal

I've been putting in some effort lately to integrate Drupal and CiviCRM more. I think the best channel for this is via CCK. However, CCK needs some upgrades to make it module friendly (think about how a module can define and export views). Ultimately, I hope to have more contributions in this area.

I expect a lot more CiviCRM integration work from the CRM community as well. There's been a lot of movement on this lately, and I expect it will reach a tipping point where we see some really great innovation.

-M
--
http://www.ppmaf.org

I will test any attempt to incorporate Daylight Saving Time support into Drupal. I have a publically-accessible test site (along with shell and SVN access) that can be used exclusively for this purpose, and I am willing to help in any way that I can.

If you are interested in working on DST support, and would like my assistance, please contact me.

I plan to hire (for 18 weeks full time) a Drupal programmer / theme developer. Plan to develop a Common Look & Feel (internet and intranet) theme for Drupal. May also ask our programmers to contribute to the Liquid Wiki Module. And, to introduce the first (to my knowledge) drupal-powered Government of Canada web site. :-)

patrick

Following my overall interest and commitment to see Drupal work for art and music applications, my goals are to:

1) Move DrupalArt to a special interest group on groups.drupal.org and get some good discussions going.
2) Rework the Playlist.module into a relationship toolkit for 4.7. This will make creation of different playlists (audio, video, podcasts, image) with unique metadata and XML feeds much easier. I would also like to work with Ber and others who are working on similar relationship schemes to see how we can integrate all these similar ideas into a unified API.
3) Finish the audio_playlist.module which provides basic audio playlist functionality using the above API. Start working on a general nodeapi version.
4) Write some configure profiles for the new installer.

• maintain the french translations for Drupal 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 with "drupalfrancais" folks,
• produce french translations for modules (og, cck and views to begin with) and handbooks.

I plan to translate modules that I find userful to German, but that will depend on the time I have to experiment with these modules and on which modules I am going to use.

As usual I will take the time to submit meaningful bug reports when I come across any bugs.

If I find the time to try the Drupal - Simple Machines bridge I may contribute code to that, but chances are slim :-(.

I onced have to adapt a drupal 4.6 to accept SSL special sectiosn (Login, transactions and user account sensible information) but the idea was to have only those sections under SSL and not the whole site.

I think this is something useful to include it in the l() url() drupal_goto() and some other common functions so a developer can choose an SSL sepecific actions and also include it in the appropiate modules (menu, special settings, etc.).

I think this might be an useful feature, although I'd like to hear some comments about it.

Thanks,
a.=

OK, we're not really a "person", but CivicSpace has lots of plans, though we prefer to back up the plans with working code.

The current push is a complete install system for Drupal 4.8. See the videocast at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COg-orloxlY

Not completed, but it works. Find out how you can help.

David Geilhufe
Managing Partner, CivicSpace

1. A set of Black Box Tests (probably using Selenium) that can be run manually on core and selected contrib modules.
2. An automated way to run these tests
3. Help Angela aka Webchick with whitebox tests for core modules

I am already working getting a bared down CCK (minus fields and widgets) into core. I will, of course, work on enhancing form API and providing bugfixes where necessary.

Using Selenium to test Drupal is a good idea...
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The news is Now Public | Drupal development: making the world better, one patch at a time.

A feedparser library that any module can use, including an API for modules to get into the raw feed items - to allow enclosures and custom items to be extracted by any modules.

Node_Aggregator/aggregator_node updating to work with new feedparser library and allow proper clean up of expired feed item nodes.

Sort out the original core aggregator.module to use the need feedparser library and continue working as it does for people who don't like loads of nodes being created from feeds.

I noticed a few people had aggregator / RSS on their tasks list, although not at the top. Would be happy to work with anybody else. I know Ber already got in contact about it all :)

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Ixis (UK) providing Drupal consultancy and Drupal theme design.

I just read through this thread. What a lot of good stuff people are working on.

• I'm currently preparing for the "big change" - going into business with Drupal as a "technology platform".
• In that light I'm working on making Drupal better known in Denmark.
• Also I'm working on building a group of danish Drupal developers/consultants/users.
• We'll have our first meeting on the 18th of may.
• There's a Denmark drupal group and there's also a drupaldenmark.dk website which I will maintain actively.
• I work with a few handfulls of people now - looking into a couple of markets in Denmark, and how we can penetrate them - with Drupal.
• I still maintain the services and consultants pages on Drupal.org. I think I should make it better known.
• I also still answer some questions on the fora from time to time.
• Also ask some.
• I plan to go to the Euro OSCON in september in which case it will be the first time I've made it to one of those.

Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com

My goals for contributing to Drupal will definitely be usability and theming. While having a focus on working with the smarty template engine (works best for designers) there are several issues regarding usability I might help out. Beginning with the implementation of the menu system which lacks handling opening/expanding and activating the right menu item a user clicked on or viewing content of.

More to come.

Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind

With linking in to and reworking the drupal login and registration process people would your drupal users would automatically be able to get "webmail" through your drupalised domain and website.....have things planned and down on paper and through some trial and error had things going on 4.6 last year but it was rough....would love to expand on this need the developer input but....

**THIS SHOULD BE UP NEAR MY WEBMAIL POST*** HEY ITS LATER HERE

General Plan for the next 6 months:

• upgrade the Drupal Hebrew translation to 4.7
• Create an Israeli Drupal guide / community on drupal.org.il
• Put the Hebrew translation into drupal.org.il and back into drupal.org as time allows.
• Drupal RTL themes for Hebrew and other RTL languages.
• Test and initiate Hebrew integration of Drupal's e-commerce module.

Amnon
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Personal: Bring Dolphin's Simple Joy to your Work - Job - Career
Professional: Eco-web strategy for a better world

Improve the flickr.module
Improve the album.module

Complete distribution for Non-Profits.

Tag my releases... :)

Best Regards,
Warren Brian Noronha

Drupal look to me as the most community oriented CMS. From the history perspective drupal comes from 'dorp' (village), thats simple cool and the way to go if you ask me. I belief the social networking systems (frienster, openBC, linkedin, etx) has been a home for specific groups. Still we can archive so much more.

I may be a dreamer, but I like to work on my dreams, I'm involved in a project that is called Knowledge sharing over social software . We are using Drupal to get there and we have been working on the project from September 2005 (and continue until September 2007). At the moment I'm trying to get some discussion about knowledge sharing and the drupal spirit. Any one who likes to follow this tread or has some opinion on it, pleas join the group. I'll start proposing patches to work in the direction in a few days.

I am not a coder, but I do have a readymade LARGE taxonomy, with an extensible structure from a previous project, to which I own the IP. It is currently 25,000 items long, and that was the test to see if it would scale to the millions needed (95% of which are geographical...)

If I worked with a programmer I could turn it into a Core Taxonomy that new Drupals could use.

SHARING IS GOOD.

Imagine a world in which Drupal Sites are based on the same core taxonomy. If you then add new functions such as "sites with things in common agree to grant mutual recognition of members" then you can do things like enable INTERSITE networking and activity. E.g. a search function within one surfing site could also draw on taxonomy marked material in another.

E.g "Surf LA" member planning trip to UK does "UK + Breaks" - which of course scores zero in Surf LA, but does pull in results from "UK Surf". Both sites joined the Surf Cloud for surf sites.

With taxonomy added to Profiles the social networking side really takes off as each site benefits from the members of all the others, while concentrating on what they do best. Real community.

Mutual Recognotion and permissions. Always remain in control of site. Some groups might be highly restricted "schools in London", with vetting to join, others will be open.

Functionally what is needed is a module that allows a webmaster to quickly identify and edit those elements of the taxonomy that they need.

Note - when we built it we also designed it to be language independent - so translations and synonyms are automatic. (It's a taxonomy of MEANINGS). This is done by treating entries as numbers.

E.g. 1456.67 is London.UK. But it's also Londres.UK. Thus allowing for automatic cross language matching...

Finally - there is always the ability for sites to have LOCAL taxonomies, but one cool concept would be that registered sites report back their taxonomies, thus allowing for new ones to be formalised, and for existing ones to start to be ranked, AND by meta analysis, tools could be developed to find "sites like this". For example doing a search on, say "larium" could turn up support sites in countries where the drug has a different name.

WHAT I NEED is to work with a UK based techie so that I can turn my existing work into a suitably formatted set of files, and then continue where I left off on development.

TO DO NOW - the basic "common taxonomy module". Others can start the clever stuff once we provide the basic building block. We just have to make sure we can see the scope, to design it well. (For example I never could understand why Profile didn't use taxonomy from the start).

Ian Dickson - community specialist.

I'm working on the oracle DB port now. I'm hoping to have it all done before the next major release.... see http://drupal.org/node/39260 its progresslng slowly, as there aren't a lot of contributors or testers (just me and one other guy).