Drupal 4.7 released

Two major projects have been released. The first is Drupal 4.7.

The second is code-named Nathaniel.

Would you believe that the first project actually took longer?!

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Progress

I'm nearly ready to submit the first set of chapters to the publisher.

I'm also revisiting the publish and subscribe modules. Finished 4.6 and 4.7 versions coming soon.

I was able to hear Ray Kurzweil speak this past week at the Human Computer Interaction Forum I attended.

Baby coming soon, too!

Resource contention

I've spent the past two days migrating a very busy community site from a Windows server in Georgia to a FreeBSD server in Iowa. The new server is faster hardware, but even so the server is living on the edge of available CPU and memory. This is good, because it means I'll have to learn more about tuning a busy Drupal server.

I'm off to Washington, D.C. for a bit to work on a BEN project. I see the long shadows of CCK, actions, workflow, and views playing a big part.

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OSCMS

It's now day 2 of the Open Source CMS Summit and the conference is going great guns. There's a general hum around the conference and great ideas are getting thrown around.

Strangely, the best session today for me was not Drupal-related -- it was the smalltalk session on Seaside. I'd read about smalltalk's continuations before but had never seen them demonstrated. Avi Bryant gave a demo that had jaws on the floor as he dynamically changed his (~8 lines of code) shopping cart demo while it was running. Unfortunately, Drupal is firmly anchored in the mediocre world of PHP, and that shows no signs of changing. But that doesn't mean we can't take some of the ideas, where the language allows us.

Adrian Rossouw, Earl Miles, Jeff Robbins and I had a great conversation over dinner about how actions, forms API, and web services can integrate. The theory is that actions take parameters as input, and one way to get those parameters is to fill out a form. So a browser can drive the action, but an XML-RPC call could, too. New tonight was the realization that automatically exposing subsets of actions as macros to end users who have the proper permissions solves much of the problem that we currently solve with a PHP filter, only more securely.

As I've said to several people today, what makes Drupal fun for me is a combination of working on problems and solving them in the best way possible and being surrounded by people who are smarter than I am. That stretches me, just like approaching a problem from a completely different paradigm (e.g., the smalltalk demo) stretches me.

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