drupal7

Thanks to everyone to coming out for the October, 2009 Central Florida Meetup at MindComet's offices in Altamonte Springs.

We started off with a demonstration/discussion/exploration of the latest Drupal 7 development version. We took about an hour to explore all the new features. We spent a significant amount of time with the Dashboard module, fields in core, taxonomy as fields (wow), and ImageAPI in core (sweet).

Just wanted to pass along my experience using the WebPI install of PhP 5.2.10. It works ok out of the box for Drupal6 but I discovered that several dlls are not enabled by default that are helpful for several Drupal tasks, notably:

tidy (see this iis.net forum post)
xsl
pdo and pdo_mysql - these are required by Drupal7
mcrypt - required by phpmyadmin

If you were at the recent Drupalcon in DC you may have seen Mark Boulton and I at the UX Table plying people with jellybeans and requesting offerings to our Drupal7 UX Suggestion Box. This is just one of the ways that we are hoping to engage the Drupal community in this project and to continue that process, you'll find below the contents of the suggestion box (as of late Friday, unfortunately our desk and all it's contents was trashed on Friday evening (boo!) so it's possible we've missed a few suggestions).

You may have heard the excellent and very exciting news that following on from our work on Drupal.org, Mark Boulton Design has been contracted to take a look at the User Experience for the upcoming Drupal 7, and I'm very happy to be working with him on this project as well.

Background and Purpose
After the SimpleTest session Wednesday morning I talked with sethcohn about some possible solutions to some of the issues that are being faced with full scale implementation of the unit test coverage. Some of the ideas are specific to the SimpleTest framework, but much could be applied to other testing frameworks. According to chx it sounds like the SimpleTest framework is going to be used which makes this information especially relevent.

To start off the biggest unknown currently is how to go about implementing "function unit testing" (which I beleive is the term). In other words calling an individual function with different arguements and checking the results against the know correct output. Until now this has been virtually untested and, to my knowledge, not really thought about at all. Instead "functional" testing has been worked on (as I was apart of).

We received, by show of hands, a considerable number of people who claim to be interested in contributing to the testing challenge, as introduced by Dries in his keynote. If anywhere near the number of people that raised their hands contribute, it could create a very chaotic situation and put a lot of pressure on the SimpleTest maintainer(s). In an attempt to address this I have compiled some ideas and thoughts.

This is the beginnings of a design specification proposal for an abstracted API for implementing web services within Drupal 7. This allows Drupal to act as both a server and client for web services in any protocol medium (XML-RPC, RDF, RSS, JSON, etc). It is the combined efforts from a number of people at Druplicon including Marc Ingram, Scott Nelson, Nedjo Rogers, Dmitri Gaskin, etc.

Services API