Now I am going to miss some of the code sprint on Friday at the Chicago DrupalCon. I began asking about real dates of London months ago and now I am left without a choice but to ask publically: when IS DrupalCon London including core conversation, sprints, whatnot? Some of us need the dates many months ahead to be able to plan and it's extremely frustrating 'cos I am 100% these dates are known.

Following up on Leisa's very important and insightful blog post (and David Rothstein's comment therein), I think I need to clarify something. In my understanding "Talk is silver, code is gold" is a bit misunderstood. It does not mean that Drupal abhors architecture. The Drupal community and myself have spent considerable amount of time and money to meet face to face and discuss problems -- so it's not that we do not realize the need for "talk".

1. The GPL says you can charge for your code. But you can't stop anyone else from distributing your code for free. It happened with MySQL Enterprise.
2. Whether the Drupal Association wants to be a seller of apps I do not know. The payment infrastructure exists. We have code repos. It's a decision to be made. I do not know who makes that decision and how.

There was an excellent article about the growing interest of Russia and China in open source. I am shocked by the lack of reaction in our community -- we need to face the question: what we will do when (when! not if) hackers appear with interests closely alligned with those governments? It's not impossible their dayjob will be core hacking -- ie they will have the time the ordinal core hacker doesn't. We have already shown that we are willing to give up something good (namely compatibility in one direction with other phpass using systems) for the sake of one government (the USA, in this case) in this issue. How do we continue?

This document contains my list for what I would like to see done ASAP. It uses CSS/jQuery to provide sane numbering for embedded lists and won't be consistent on feed aggregators so for the list you need to read the original. I copied this to http://groups.drupal.org/node/116044 for easier editing. Disclaimer: this is just my list and not all items are agreed upon. I am not a core maintainer this is just a list of things that IMO needs to be done ASAP and I would love to see people working on them and obviously I will work on them too. We desperately need frontend folks to chime in -- I am more familiar with backend issues. As said in the previous post, get a few, important, quick, doable fixes now, think major at Chicago, code some foundations at Chicago, work until London, finish together in London.

If I would schedule Drupal 8 then I would very quickly look around the issue queue and get a list of desired not-too-big cleanups and fixes that would happen before Chicago. Code slush before the full thaw. (kudos to catch for the idea btw) Then at Chicago at the core conversations we could figure out the big things we want and work on them until and including London. End of London, soft freeze! 2012 North America DrupalCon, release. Nice and tight, about 16 months lots and lots of cleanup, UI love and not much but enough craziness.

There is little doubt that the patch of 2010 is http://drupal.org/files/issues/name-change.patch

I do not even know where to start...

• Have you ever seen such a geek announcement of a marriage?
  Congrats, Jacine! Similar stories are usually told by men -- and in way less cool fashion. :)

In Drupal 6, dependencies[] = foo. In Drupal 7, dependencies[] = foo (>=2.x, <4.17, !=3.7). Meaning, we need foo module major version to be at least 2, any version up to (but not including) 4.17 aside from 3.7 which was horribly buggy. If you need to do this with core, uses system in place of foo. Also note that you can say dependencies[] = foo (>=7.x-2.x).

Some modules need to take over access control of a router entry. Using hook_menu_alter is a good idea for this. But sometimes (especially for node paths) your module only makes decisions in some cases and wants to call the original. Here's how you do this in a way that does not hardwire anything:
<?php
function comment_allow_anonymous_menu_alter(&$items) {
// 2 is the node we need.
array_unshift($items['comment/reply/%node']['access arguments'], 2, $items['comment/reply/%node']['access callback']);

that old joke about how rich people only travel with their toothbrush and a credit card? Forget it. My carry on contains a lot of special items that are fairly hard to find.