Drupal.lu

2010 is here and its time for another Summer of Code, courtesy of Google! For those who don't know, Summer of Code is an amazing program in which student developers are paid a stipend by Google in exchange for working on open source projects along with mentors from those projects. Drupal has benefited enormously from Summer of Code over the years.

Our first Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the second alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

Code freeze begins September 1st. During this period, we fix bugs and when Drupal 7 is stable, we release. In the past, we have done manual testing. This time we have an automated testing framework and already a large number of tests. In an ideal world, we would only release when all code is touched by tests. While this won't guarantee that Drupal will be bug free, every test contributes to the overall quality of Drupal.

Improving the usability of Drupal is very important. Yesterday, I wrote about the progress that was made on Drupal 7 usability -- the community has made a ton of incremental improvements, while Mark and Leisa have been preparing mockups and wireframes that provide significant over-arching improvements to Drupal's ease of use. Combined, I believe these efforts could make Drupal 7 a great release.

Have you been looking for an excuse to play around a bit with Drupal 7, and have an interest in helping to directly shape it? Would you like to not only see how Drupal core contributors collaborate together, but become one yourself? Do you have an itch you'd like scratched and are willing to help scratch others' in return? Would you like to be exposed to new and interesting areas of Drupal you might not have otherwise experienced? Are you exceptionally good at finding faults and breaking things?

The Drupal core developers have a long history of making user experience improvements. The developers have made it easier to install, to update, to internationalize, to customize, to theme, to find help, to recover from errors, and to interact. A few years ago, the Drupal project lead, Dries, wrote about The Ockham's Razor Principle of Content Management Systems which stated

Earlier today, Google announced the list of organizations that have been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2009, and we are thrilled to announce that Drupal has been selected once again! This will mark the Drupal project's fifth year of participation in this fantastic program, which provides a great opportunity for the Drupal community to grow our ranks of dedicated and talented new contributors, award existing long-term contributors, and get some exciting new coding projects done at the same time!

Following the final day of DrupalCon presentations, we're hosting a code and documentation sprint, both at the DrupalCon conference facility and online. You can help! Documentation sprinters are coordinating tasks on wiki-style pages and talking on IRC at #drupal-docs (see instructions for joining).