Drupal Core Updates

Welcome to the first in an occasional series of posts about recent happenings in Drupal 7 core.

This is modeled after the Drupal 8 posts that have been going on for a while; you can find all Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 core updates on the Drupal Core Updates page going forward.

Drupal 7.40 released (UPDATE: Drupal 7.41 released also)

Drupal 7.40 was released last week! This is a maintenance release containing bug fixes, performance improvements, and a few new features. Now is a good time to test it out and upgrade your sites. If you discover any problems introduced by this release, report them in the issue queue.

Drupal 7.40 contains no security fixes, but Drupal 7.39 (released in August) does, so make sure your sites are updated to at least that version. Note that there is a security release window coming up today (October 21) also. (Update: Drupal 7.41 was released today, containing a security fix for the core Overlay module.)

New features in Drupal 7 core

Many people have the misconception that Drupal 8 will be the first version of Drupal that allows new features to be added after the initial stable release, but in fact that's been the policy for Drupal 7 since early 2012.

Several features have been added to Drupal 7 since it was released, but awareness is not as high as it could be which is one of the reasons we haven't added more. One goal of this series of posts is to highlight features that have been added recently as well as new ones that are up for consideration. A sample is below.

It's been a while since the last Drupal 8 Core Update, and many exciting things have happened: most significantly, Drupal 8.0's first release candidate was released! As Campbell Vertesi points out, this isn't the final release: "while Drupal 8.0 is stable enough to use, we're still discovering critical bugs a little to frequently to recommend it for everyone, in every use case." But, now that Drupal 8 is in the release candidate phase, our goal is to move it to release as quickly as possible, so we're going to be a lot more careful about the patches we commit to it.

In other exciting news, the Drupal community on Google+ has grown to more than 10,000 members, and the legacy Drupal 8 testbots have been disabled in favor of DrupalCI.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Some other notable changes to Drupal 8.0 included adding Dynamic Page Cache (which doubles Drupal 8's speed in many use cases) and a Stable base theme to core (to allow us to improve Drupal's markup in future 8.x releases without breaking themes), removing SafeMarkup::set(), ::checkPlain(), and friends (they were dangerous) and PHPTemplate (it had been superceded by Twig), and switching to a single vendor directory in the root (to allow Composer to be used without modifications).

Also, Wolfgang Ziegler became a typed data system mainatiner; Lauri Eskola became a Theme system maintainer; and Lucas Hedding, Valery Lourie, Alina Mackenzie, Chris McCaferty, and Cathy Theys all became core mentoring co-ordinators.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal 8 Core Update, Drupal 8 got a UI for responsive image mapping, a proposal for a new Drupal.org content model was put forward and a bunch of improvements were made to Drupal.org, notably: the first comment to an issue is now automatically generated to make it easier to see the original issue summary, test result output was improved, and it's now possible to test patches on PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and 7 simultaneously.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal 8 Core Update, 8.0.0-beta13 and 8.0.0-beta14 were released, work started on the Drupal 8 User guide, Code Drop and PreviousNext merged, and Holly Ross gave a summary of the latest Drupal Association board meeting.

Since the last Drupal 8 core update, the API module maintainers started looking for co-maintainers, and Two-Factor Authentication was rolled out to anyone with the Community role on Drupal.org (among other improvements).

What's new with Drupal 8?

Drupal 8's minimum PHP version increased to 5.5.9, and minimum PostgreSQL version increased to 9.1.2. Also, tim-e handed off co-maintainership of the Contact module to Jibran Ijaz and Andrey Postnikov; and Frando stopped being a maintainer of the Entity, Form, and Render systems — special thanks to both tim-e and Frand for their amazing contributions!

Since the last Drupal 8 Core Update, DrupalCon Los Angeles took place, the proposed organizational structure for the Drupal project was approved and MAINTAINERS.txt was updated to reflect this (although it still needs to be updated in the Drupal 7 branch), and the Drupal Association announced updates to their 2015 financial plan.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Drupal 8.0.0-beta11 and 8.0.0-beta12 were released, a new category for issues, plan, was added to categorize meta issues, the Drupal 8 Security bug bounty program was launched, Angie "webchick" Byron analyzed Drupal major version adoption and walked us through the new DrupalCI testing infrastructure, hook_update_N() became required for core patches that introduce data model changes, the number of outstanding criticals was reduced to a new all-time low of 15, and for a while, every single critical was RTBC or being addressed!

Congratulations to Alex "effulgentsia" Bronstein and Jess "xjm", who became core committers as part of the Evolving and documenting Drupal core's structure, responsibilities, and decision-making policy (which could still use your review)!

What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal Core Update, the minimum version of MySQL needed to run D8 was raised to 5.5.3, and Drupal 8.0.0-beta10 was released in time for DrupalCon Los Angeles (which is next week).

What's new with Drupal 8?

Happy Earth Day! Since the last Drupal Core Update, the Drupal Developer Days event brought lots of exciting progress: we (briefly) reduced the number of critical issues to 35, and a week-long performance sprint made Drupal 8 2—20 times faster! Also, Gwendolyn Anello at DrupalEasy announced that DrupalEasy is partnering with Stetson University to offer Drupal courses!

Welcome to the second quarter of 2015! In the past two weeks, Dries proposed an evolution to Drupal core's structure and decision-making process, the Drupal Community mourned the passing of Aaron Winborn and the Drupal Association announced The Aaron Winborn Award to honor amazing community members in his memory, Addison Berry was elected the 2015 Drupal Association Director At-Large, and lastly, a group to help mentors was formed.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal Core Update, Drupal 8.0.0-beta9 was released (beta8 was skipped due to installer issues), all known critical issues with the Drupal 8 configuration system were fixed, and the taxonomy term reference field was removed in favor of entity reference fields.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal Core Update, the Drupal community has reduced the number of D8 critical issues to 45, and managed to keep the number of critical issues on one page since we hit 50 criticals on March 6th! We've also changed the behavior of the "admin role" setting so that any user with the "admin role" passes all permission checks automatically (like the superuser); added HTML5-lib to core so that HTML5 can be parsed properly; and fixed a bug preventing all PHPUnit tests from running.

Also, after a few months of work, the Technical Working Group, Drupal.org Software Working Group, Security Working Group, and frequent project application reviewers presented their proposed changes to the project application review process. They're looking for your feedback, so please read their proposal and leave your thoughts!