I thought this evident but apparently not. You can download Drupal and run the tests provided. Just like that. If you download a few contribs and they have tests you still can run tests on any webserver, any environment what so ever to see whether they work together. It can be a small host or a cloud provider where all you have is the browser and no command line.

Seeing how much work I put into the past four major core releases and how it ended up as an inconsistent, complex mess, I feel it might be better actually if I withdraw and let others steer. Hopefully they can do better. I am not going to review or comment on any D8 feature patches. On the other hand there is an area where I am needed and that's the major bug queue. I am going to focus my attention on that. There are "toxic", year old issues that just don't want to go away. If each bug takes a week to get rid of, which is an optimistic view then we have two years of work ahead.

Say you have http://example.com/drupal/documentation?page=1. Let's presume documentation is an alias for node/26419

Then after a full bootstrap

DrupalCon should be two parallel conferences, one of sessions primarily directed towards business and a free core conversations track. This split is mostly complete: we have had a core conversation track, often in physically separate spaces for the last few DrupalCons. Now we had a session deadline that made it totally impractical to submit any session carrying any value to fellow contributors. The last step is to introduce session only tickets and adjust the focus a little.

There's a website I got involved with -- I built the first version on Drupal 6, with a hacked location_search module (for free). It kind of works, I am not proud of it but surely there are a lot worse sites out there. It's about 1000 nodes with some location search and mapping. The site owner has about 6-800 dollars to get it ported to D7 and clean it up. First we tried with a Hungarian guy who was inept in it. Then another Hungarian company which did some progress (still on D6) but simply disappeared after some time.

In Drupal 7 many times (in my case, it's a userpoints transaction) all you have is an entity but you want it to be, say, a node and you want to reach node properties and fields. If you add a condition, entity is type node, then the next condition will magically know the entity is node. Second, for actions the first thing you want to do is add a variable (this I learned at the relation presentation at London!) and after that you can use [some_node:field-foo] which previously you couldn't.

I have created a version 2.0 site and the owner wanted the two to live on, keeping the existing v1 pages read-only because the migration costs couldn't be justified. The new site should appear in the same domain -- no subdomains. Yes, even this can be done with Drupal 7 without hacking core with a little help from Apache.

I have more than once tried to raise my voice against the overwhelming hype of cloud computing especially when sold to startups. I just found a non-tech article that seems a good excuse to write this post I had in my head for some time. I have read the following reasoning many times:

1. You need to care about scaling from day one.
2. There is an easy way to scale.
3. This way is the cloud.

Each of them are wrong.

Blog module has been stabbed in the git! Profile is dead! The rebels have their hands on trigger! Are these the days of Drupal Armaggeddon?

Condensing my previous post and other happenings into a shortlist.

1. We cut out the really unused product modules immediately. This is ongoing and a consensus is forming around the imminent death of blog, dashboard, php, profile, shortcut, statistics and trigger.
2. We find maintainers or do a quick refactor for the modules listed in the previous that stay. The goal here is the stabilize bleeding patients but nothing more. This seems to be ongoing, yesterday I saw a guy on IRC who was contemplating on taking the forum module maintainer hat.
3. With the "kernel" team now free, we focus on reworking our "kernel" (don't call this a framework -- maybe later, maybe never) to something nice. This is ongoing with the Configuration Management and the Web Services initiative.
4. Meanwhile, people rally around onramp profile (nee snowman). This seems to be a rather nice idea with a proper process: list of personas, user stories, specification before coding. The works. If this comes to be, we can cut more of the current product modules. This seems to be ongoing, there are people interested in this enough to give it a good name instead of a joke. This is something we definitely need help with and there are people who do these steps day in, day out, please head over to the group and participate.