Note: Patch Spotlight is deprecated. All initiatives should be catalogued now under sub-pages of http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core.
Twig Sprint (online)
Come help us convert Drupal 8's theme engine to Twig!
We're nearing the home stretch of Round 1 of the Twig conversion, and it's time to get all hands on deck! If you can create patches, test patches, review patches, convert PHPTemplate to twig, improve documentation, or help us clean up the theme system (there's plenty of non-twig-related work too!) then please, meet us online from 1-5pm on Friday, March 22nd
Drupal long-term advanced training program - stage 1
9 sessions - one (2-3 days) per month
Course program
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EntityNG and Typed Data IRC meeting
Next EntityNG and typed data API IRC meeting.
Join #drupal-entity on freenode!
A small but important fix to our dataflow
This is the story about a small but imho important issue i want to expose to some people's eyes before D8 doors close.
It's about dataflow and the data providers i talk about are the info hooks. Maybe they will die some day but apparently not in D8.
Think of hook_entity_info(), hook_field_info(), hook_hook_info(), even incognito ones like hook_menu() or hook_permission().
(It's a good idea to change them to a common naming scheme but that's another story.)
The problem
So what's wrong with info hooks? Nothing. They are asked, they provide info. That's their job.
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Drupal 8 Core sprint during BADCamp in Europe, Gent, Belgium
We are holding a Drupal Core Sprint from the 1st - 4th November in Gent, Belgium. This is during the same days that BADCamp takes place in San Francisco.
The meeting place for the tour tomorrow is around 10 at 'Het zuid' in Gent (Woodrow Wilson square)
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Use overlay/modal when adding/editing and then returning to same page
A saw EclipseCG's session at DrupalCon Munich where he demonstrated the great improvement work he has done to Blocks and Layout for D8. I am really looking forward to be able to start experimenting with that.
However, the demo also showed a typical case for where we can greatly improve the usability, and UX feedback for site builders when, as in this demo, adding a new block from the library.
As it works today:
1 - Click the "Add block..." link
2 - The library page replaces the page
3 - Pick a block and you get to a third page
Hard to do site builder usability testing
The work being done by Bojhan and others in this group, as well as within the Spark and other initiatives is simply amazing. It will undoubtedly lead to better UX and usability for especially those that will work with content.
As a site builder I am very eager to be able to get more involved in this work. Personally I am most interested in helping to test the usability and UX when constructing these editing interfaces, and provide feedback on that. Especially since it is those interfaces I as a site builder will be using the most in my work.
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Designing Drupal's Mobile Navigation and Beyond
The short story
Come and help us perfect and implement the hot new mobile interface design in Drupal 8. Try the prototype on your phone. Also, go to the issue queue.
The long story
Over the past six months we've been working on designing the experience of getting to where you want within Drupal's admin interface.
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The future of procedural and hooks: Namespaces? Pure OOP?
Hi,
while the conversion of OOP code to PSR-0 for D8 is making progress, the original requests for namespaces were all about procedural and hooks:
http://drupal.org/node/867772
There have been arguments by the PSR-0 people that this would be a too difficult design task.
There have been other arguments that it is not worth the trouble, and we should rather move our procedural code to OOP. Imo this is certainly a possibility, but a lot of questions about this are not answered or even discussed.
Possible directions
So, what is the future of procedural and hooks?
EDIT:
Read moreTwin Cities Drupal Camp - D8 Theme Sprint
There's a great event called DrupalCamp Twin Cities going on May 18-19, 2012 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Since the event is one of my favorites, I've signed up to attend and also will be organizing a Drupal 8 Theme Layer sprint on Sunday, May 20th (as well as during the camp of course!). The specific times and location are still TBD but plan on an approximately 10 AM to 5 PM sprint.
Agenda:
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Information architecture redo
I want to get serious about redoing the information architecture of Drupal. To be frank, it's a problem. Users don't know what's structure and whats content. Neither do we. I see developers all the time asking where their modules belong.
Read moreCall for prototypers
If you have development chops, designers and other contributors of this community need your help bringing designs to life.
Allow me to paint a picture of the need and skills required...
The task of creating content has been redesigned (http://groups.drupal.org/node/217434), and has reached a point of consensus. At this point, the design really needs to interactive to flush out how all of the various interactions will work (or don't). Additionally, once made interactive, we validate the direction by testing the prototype with end users.
Read moreProposal: Loosen rules regarding patches that may be backported during a stable release (7.x+)
It's great when we get newly injected energy into usability efforts in Drupal, as happened with the Drupal Usability Study at Google last week. However, these patches always run aground of various "freezes" we put in place in the stable release of Drupal:
- API freeze
- Don't commit patches that break backwards API compatibility within a stable release, for the benefit of contributed module and theme authors.
- String freeze
- Don't change any user-facing text (e.g. anything in a t() function), for the benefit of translation teams.
- UI freeze
- Don't commit patches that affect the user interface, for the benefit of the documentation team, as well as to not invalidate tutorials, screencasts, books, etc.
- Feature freeze
- Don't commit patches that add new features; stick only to bug fixes. Additional functionality gets added in contrib.
As far as I can tell, these guidelines are not actually written down anywhere, but simply passed down word-of-mouth from core generation to core generation. I want to do two things in this thread:
1) Create documentation around these guidelines.
2) Propose that we change these guidelines to make them looser and allow more classes of patches to be backported, particularly minor UI tweaks and string improvements.
Here's a proposal (co-developed by Dries, Moshe, Alex, and I), with the items in bold being ones that we propose to change, the rest being documented to the best of my current understanding. My hope is that this can both help is iterate faster on the core product, and also provide additional incentive for people helping with Drupal 8 core development, as there'd be a chance of them seeing their changes in a version of Drupal sooner than 18+ months away.
Read moreThe Progression of the Drupal Mobile HTML Prototype
The aim of the Drupal Mobile HTML prototype is to demonstrate the look, feel and thinking behind the design for Drupal’s Mobile Admin interface. It is purely for demonstrative purposes.
This document references the D8MUX Roadmap and everything in that post also applies here.
Design Initiative IRC Meetups
Please join us for our 1st bi-weekly meeting to discuss issues and progress related to the Drupal 8 Design initiative. The meeting will be held in #drupal-design in IRC.
PST: 11:00 AM
EST: 2:00 PM
UK: 7:00 PM
CET: 8:00 PM
Making learnability a priority in Drupal.
Drupal is growing up, and with its maturity comes a complexity that is making it harder and harder to learn. We have initiatives that focus on making the user interfaces easier to use, but we have not been paying attention to how improvements to core have affected new contributors, and their ability to learn how to code for Drupal. This wiki is be a place where we can track and discuss how to keep Drupal coding easy to learn.
(This idea comes out of the Engineering for the 80% talk given at Drupal Camp Colorado, and the Bay Area Drupal Camp in 2011.)
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API docs sprint!
Some of you may have heard that I wanted to organize an API docs cleanup sprint... Well, here it is:
(issue) http://drupal.org/node/1310084
The idea is to have a sprint over the next couple of weeks, and get the Drupal Core API documentation to conform better to our documentation standards. All the instructions are on the issue... please feel free to post general questions here, but otherwise, discussions about specific documentation, standards, etc. are better off on the issue queue.
Let's get this done!
Ping pong release cycles (for Drupal core)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock
"Tick-Tock" is a model adopted by chip manufacturer Intel Corporation since 2007 to follow every microarchitectural change with shrinking of the process technology. Every "tick" is a shrinking of process technology of the previous microarchitecture and every "tock" is a new microarchitecture.[1] Every year, there is expected to be one tick or tock.[1]
And now, the same thing for Drupal release management.
"Ping" release (so far this was D5, D6, D7, etc):
- no backwards compatibility
- break existing APIs
Kicking it old Skool!
I know what it feels like to have your hard work critiqued, piles of issues to solve and to deal with some of the hardest discussions and posts we can have. I know the many hours spent, sacrificing time with our loved ones, time without sleep or the so many other things we give up to do our part.
Read moreTaking a more focused approach to Drupal 8 development
Last night, as I read through the conversation that is happening on the "Make core maintainable" issue (http://drupal.org/node/1255674), I couldn't help but feel that while this conversation is important, it may be the wrong conversation to be having at this time. I am glad this conversation has continued coming out of DrupalCon London, but I feel like we haven't answered the fundamental question of "what is Drupal?", which may help steer the conversation in a direction that will help us select the features that really need to be in core.
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