News and announcements

We have some changes to announce relative to Drupal's documentation team.

Firstly, I'd like to thank Addison Berry (add1sun) for her two years of service as the Drupal documentation lead. She has done a great job of coaching documentation contributors and developing a vision for Drupal's documentation during her time as the lead. Addison has recently decided it was time to step down from this role, and I am pleased to be able to have her pass the torch onto a pair of keen documentation contributors.

I've appointed Ariane Khachatourians (arianek) and Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) as the new documentation co-leads. Ariane will be taking the primary responsibility for the Drupal documentation, and Jennifer will be taking primary responsibility for the Drupal API documentation. They will also be working together to strengthen and build the Drupal documentation team, drive the direction and strategy for documentation projects, communicate the priorities and status of the documentation effort to the greater community, and organize documentation sprints.

Today marks reaching Drupal 7's 0 critical bug milestone! We've rolled one final beta release to shake out any last minute problems and fix strings. Please help!

This release includes:

• Upgrade to jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery UI 1.8.6
• Numerous upgrade path fixes
• Numerous accessibility fixes
• All critical bugs fixed!

For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

Hey, wait! But there are 0 criticals! Why another beta?!

As of today, Drupal 7's critical issue queue has reached 0. A huge thanks to the tremendous effort of hundreds of people who have helped bring us to this momentous milestone!

By traditional definition, we should be entering release candidate phase. However, while we have been focused on smashing criticals, we have accumulated a "major" issue queue that's currently 5 pages long, and have been neglecting to prepare for string freeze, which happens at RC1.

So, Dries and I felt that it was appropriate to have one last chance to take a final pass through the issue queue and find any straggler release blockers that might still be buried, and to identify and fix issues that impact string freeze (anything that changes something wrapped within the t() function).

From Here to RC

So. If you're in MAINTAINERS.txt, or otherwise knowledgeable about the issues in the core queue, we urgently need your help in taking one last look at your queues over the next day or two and making sure there aren't any remaining critical issues buried in the "major" list.

Because Drupal is by definition release-ready right now, we are going to strictly timebox the following:

• Maintainers have until 11:59 PM Pacific US Time Wednesday, November 17 (07:59 AM UTC) to dig up critical issues from their majors queue. Move them from "major" to "critical" so that we can discuss. (Note that these will have to pass an extremely high bar; we've had almost 3 years to identify such issues.)
• While going through your queues, if you find issues that impact string freeze, please tag them "string freeze."
• I want to roll RC1 to no later than November 30, 2010 (with the caveat of any new security/data loss issues will block the release if still active at that time). Ideally, we do RC1 even earlier (Dries's birthday is November 19, or failing that, US Thanksgiving represents a GREAT time for many of you to get away from your family and work on Drupal :)).

To be clear, once RC1 happens:

- All strings are frozen.
- All markup is frozen.
- The UI is frozen.
- The API is frozen.
- The theme system is frozen.
- Drupal 7.0's release is imminent.

So please, help do your part to get Drupal 7 DONE!

(What follows is the standard "how to test this alpha/beta release" spiel.)

The Drupal Association and the European Drupal community are pleased to announce that DrupalCon Europe will be hosted in the United Kingdom in 2011. We are inviting engaging speakers and are planning over 75 sessions that appeal to everyone from beginners to top level developers, designers and architects. This is the perfect opportunity to network, gain new skills and share your passion for Drupal. Please support this great event.