Web Development

Packt Publishing has recently been holding their annual CMS Awards which are determined by a combination of public voting and private judging. This year they introduced a new category, allowing community members from each CMS to vote for an "MVP" to honor those who the community believes should be recognized as providing the most valuable contributions to the project.

I wonder how much crossover there is in the Drupal users and role playing gamers crowds. I'm contemplating running a Paranoia RPG one-shot next DrupalCon. Who'd be interested? (If you don't know what Paranoia RPG is, you probably aren't all that interested, but the brief description is that it's a Dungeons & Dragons type game in a dark future run by a paranoid computer. There's lots of intrigue, betrayal and death. It's a dark dark dark humor game, and it's basically impossible to meet the mission objectives and completing them isn't really the point.)

Thanks very much to the hard work of Sam Boyer, we have managed to release an alpha version of Panels 2 for Drupal 6! Yes, it's finally here!
There are a series of known issues which you can find in the release notes so I wouldn't say this is 'ready' but it's ready for people to start fiddling with, at least. We're to the point where developers can start generating patches to fix stuff, too.

I have just checked in a major change to the Views API. Details can be found in the advanced help under api.html (and the handlers and plugins) pages, but the short version is that all handlers and plugins are now separated into their own files in order to conserve memory and not loaded unneeded code. This required implementing an API versioning system, and the upshot of this is that a new hook must be implemented by all Views modules: hook_views_api(). Without the proper use of this hook, the *.views.inc files will not be included.

I'll be on vacation until Sunday.

I have to say, being the sole maintainer of a project the size, complexity and popularity of Views is one of those experiences that I can't really recommend to most developers. It requires a lot of skills and talents, many of which I possess. Just not all the time.

Yay! I wanted this to happen long ago, but by delaying we managed to get Views, CCK and OG to all roll release candidates on the same day!
Release announcement here: http://drupal.org/node/277856

Greg Knaddison (greggles) over at masteringdrupal.com did a screencast talking about some of the big changes in Views 2. If you haven't looked at Views 2 yet, it's worth a look to see what's changed.

I don't have a lot of time for Views 1 right now, but there are a couple of bugs in Views 1.6 that really need to be fixed. I've been hoping for a year now that someone would volunteer to write these patches, but no one has.
Ironically, both of the patches I need relate to taxonomy, and both of these problems exist because Views is trying to use Drupal's API but the API is simply not adequate to Views' needs.

So, after two years, I've finally gone and done it.
I've unchecked the box that enables people to contact me via drupal.org. It pains me to have to do this, because there are legitimate reasons to use this form to contact me.