Drupal.org will have some scheduled downtime tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd of May, at 19:00 MEST (10am PDT, 1PM EDT, 17:00 UTC). We will be converting our database to use InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM in order to help with drupal.org performance. Since the drupal.org database is quite large, this can take a while. We hope to be back after three hours.

Update

We've just posted episode #40 of the Lullabot Drupal Podcast! This episode is a (subjective) countdown of the top 40 Drupal projects.

As many of you are no doubt aware ;) drupal.org has been pretty slow to respond lately. And while there has been a lot of work going on to resolve this problem by various members of the infrastructure team, there has not been a lot of information in terms of forum posts and such to keep the community at large informed.

So here's to changing all of that. :)

NOTE: Most of this content comes from a recent e-mail to the infrastructure mailing list (requires registration) from Eric Searcy of OSU Open Source Lab (OSL), drupal.org's generous hosting provider.

The Drupal 6 status update has spawned a very long thread with suggestions on how to improve the usability of Drupal. I figured I'd open up the discussion and let people post their favorite suggestions for usability improvements and aggregate them in a new thread. (Crazy strategy, I know.)

Personally, I'm mostly interested in the kind of suggestions that can still make it into Drupal 6 with the help of an aspiring developer. Many of our expert developers are already super-busy working on other improvements so let's try to come up with "simple" improvements that might inspire new developers to get their hands dirty and contribute to core.

So let's focus on smaller improvements rather than legendary tasks such as improved image handling or a full-blown WYSIWYG editor. Yes, we've heard you but it might not be the best strategy to focus on these big tasks now. Let's involve more people, and coach them to become experts that can help take on bigger tasks in future. And at the same time, let's aim to get some additional usability improvements into Drupal 6. (That doesn't imply that the bigger improvements can't make it into Drupal 6.)

And me? I'll promise to review and test your patches!

It's been a while since we provided a status update. And because not all of you are subscribed to the development mailing list or keep track of the issue queue, I figured a quick status update would be in order. Here is a list of some of the key features that already made it into the development version of Drupal and that will be part of the final Drupal 6 release:

1. Various theme system improvements: modules will be able to provide template files (.tpl.php) for their themes without having to create theme_ functions. In addition, Drupal will automatically pick up template files in the theme directories without having to write a single line of code. Just copy the template file from the module directory to your theme directory and start modifying your theme's copy. That's all you'll have to do.
2. Moved various internationalization features into core. Language setup screens are now separated from interface translation. It is also possible to have arbitrary path prefixes or domains set up for different languages. Posts can have languages associated with them. Multilingual websites have been a key focus for Drupal 6 and will continue to be for the remainder of the development cycle.
3. Improved logging functionality. We made it possible to have custom logging functionality, via your own modules. This is useful for large Drupal sites because it lets you customize how you want to get notified about certain events. For example, you could now configure Drupal to send a SMS or text message to your cell phone when someone leaves a comment, as well as integrate with external monitoring infrastructure, such as syslog, and enterprise network monitoring applications. Logging to the watchdog table is now optional (but on by default), so large sites can decrease database load by disabling the new dblog module and using something else instead (e.g syslog module).
4. Various usability improvements: made the installer look pretty, made it easier to deal with teasers, made signature support optional , etc.
5. We rewrote the menu system from scratch. The code of the new system is easier to understand and maintain and Drupal will require much less memory meanwhile performing at least as good as Drupal 5.