News and announcements

Almost exactly one year ago today, the Drupal community reached consensus to migrate our version control system from CVS to Git. Today, the Git migration team is extremely pleased to announce that we are officially open for community testing in advance of our proposed launch date, February 17 February 24! Just in time for DrupalCon Chicago!

All of our work is hosted at http://git-dev.drupal.org/, our staging environment for the CVS -> Git migration! Here's how YOU can help test.

Important: READ ME FIRST!

Because during this pre-launch period we're also going to be doing performance optimization and integrating new code to fix bugs, here are some important things to be aware of:

• Watch a screencast explaining how the new infrastructure works.
• Testing will only be open during certain hours of the day. The Git Migration Community Testing Wiki contains the current status of the system as well as rebuild schedules, and a calendar which tells the times during which testing is open. When testing is open, you'll see an Apache password prompt (which prevents Google from indexing the site) that looks something like this:
  
• To log in to http://git-dev.drupal.org/, you must first reset your password.. This is a basic security precaution for our development sites. You can do this from the Request new password page. You’ll need to do this anytime git-dev has been rebuilt.
  
• All users, including current CVS account holders, need to agree to terms of use in order to obtain Git access. There are instructions for doing this at http://drupal.org/node/1047190. You'll also need to do this any time the server is rebuilt. Note: Click on the "Logged in as username" link to see the choices below.
  
• The server will be rebuilt every two days. Each time that happens, you'll lose any projects and code changes you made, and also need to repeat the "reset password" and "agree to git terms" steps again in order to continue testing.
• If you find problems, please log them against the Git Migration Community Testing issue queue. Make sure whatever you're reporting doesn't show up in our list of known issues first. One of our team members will receive reports and then push them into the correct issue queue, if necessary. There is also a #drupal-gitsupport channel on irc.freenode.net for new Git users (and experienced Git users who want to help make the transition as smooth as possible :)).

Got all that? Great. Here's what you can do on our new shiny Git architecture.

The DrupalCon Chicago organizing committee is pleased to announce that the final session schedule is now available! This list includes more than 85 sessions representing the full breadth and depth of the Drupal community’s knowledge and expertise.

DrupalCon Chicago will be held March 7-10, 2011, and will feature content in six session tracks, including design and user experience, coding and development, implementation and configuration, theming, business and strategy, and community. Sessions are targeted at users of all levels, from those new to Drupal to the most seasoned veterans of the community.