April 2008 Maintainer News Draft
Coding standard change for D7
The patch which changes the spacing for the concatenation operator got committed to D7 on April 14, 2008. That means from Drupal 7 onwards, there is a space on both sides of the concat operator (the . that connects strings) instead of just on the non-literal facing side. For contributed modules, this change is optional for D6 compatible code, and recommended for D7.
Drupal 6:
$foo = "Lorem Ipsum". dolor_invoke();Drupal 7:
$foo = "Lorem Ipsum" . dolor_invoke();This is in line with most other PHP coding styleguides and the conventions of most other C-style languages.
It also means that many patches for D7 were broken, so if you have a patch in the queue, please check that it still applies before someone marks CNW.
The arguments for the change included:
Why does the . operator have a different coding standard than any other binary operator? Why does:
'foo'. $bar
make sense, but
3+ $bar
not make sense?
Creating Great Release Notes (the easy way)
You've been following the commit message pattern to provide history and credit and your commit messages from one point release to another are a great way to know which bugs have been fixed and which features added. But, how can you get that information formatted for your release notes? Thankfully, there is a script to do this for you!
In the Creating a Release Node For Your Project handbook page, step 5 goes into a little detail on how to use the cvs-release-notes.php script to get a list all the changes with their messages all pretty with HTML formatting.
For more information, see the email where Derek Wright announced the new script.
