News and announcements

On Nov 1 2012, we tested the Views UI (7.x-3.5) with intermediate-level Drupal users at the BADCamp UX/UI Summit to provide the community with a clear picture of the usability bottlenecks in the Views UI, which is now in development in Drupal 8. We have identified a number of major problems and a large number of small ones, each of which now has an issue in the Drupal Core issue queue, where we discuss solutions, provide code patches with screenshots of the changes, come to agreement and put these changes into Drupal 8.

The study planning, participant profile, findings, videos and more are explained below.

Contents

Overall findings
Study summary
Screeners and study guide
Findings from study
Next steps
Video recordings (YouTube)

Overall findings

The OSL's network provider is preparing to upgrade a core router. This is a large upgrade, but they have devised a plan to limit impact to us. All network outages should be short (5-10Min), but there will be a few of them. The first will be Saturday Nov. 10th at 10PM PST (0600 UTC). This will be a single outage to setup the new core. Following this, there will be scheduled move windows for individual sets of servers. This will impact us 4 times (we have a few servers). The first will have an "impact window" of Monday Nov. 12th 5PM PST (0100 UTC) and the window will stretch for an hour and a half. Each individual server port move should take less than 10Min, so this is certainly not a downtime window, but the network will be unstable during this period as servers are moved. We will have a similar window at 8PM PST (0400 UTC) on the same day.

The next outage window that will directly impact us will be Wed. Nov 14th from 8-11PM PST (0400-0700 UTC). Again, this shouldn't be considered a downtime, there will just be some network instability during this period. The last window is Friday Nov 16th from 8-9:30PM (0400-0530 UTC). This window includes two of our servers, but more importantly includes several important central services. This last window may have more impact than the proceeding ones. We plan to work with our provider to reduce impact.

Update: Drupal 7.18 is now available.

Drupal 7.17, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.17 release notes for a full listing.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no major new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.