Blog

T'was the night before DrupalCon and all through the city, not a hacker was typing, not even a key.

So it's a bit belated, but for those who haven't gotten a phone call from me, you get this instead. Yes, I have made it to Spain alive (and calling the US is expensive, dagnabbit). DrupalCon starts on Wednesday, so in the mean time I am doing my best to uplhold the image of the stupid American tourist.

I will spare you the daily blow by blow, as this isn't that sort of blog, but I will make a few comments on the wonders of international travel...

The schedule for DrupalCon Barcelona has been posted! Not surprisingly both of the sessions I submitted were accepted. If you're coming, stop on by! Now I guess I need to actually put together presentations for them...

There has been some discussion recently, in IRC, issue queues, and blogs, about the Drupal 7 database API and its impact on supporting different database engines. While I am still trying to avoid large amounts of public distraction, especially when we're supposed to be trying to get a Drupal 6 beta 1 out the door, I feel it's important to get a few points cleared up lest they lead to confusion later.

The Drupal development list has been sharing Drupal development server setup secrets lately (try saying that five times fast), so I figured I'd toss mine out there. And since knowing me it wouldn't be short, I figured I'd blog it instead of just posting it in email. :-) Here, then, is the development environment we've set up for Palantir.net.

I've been talking up some evil plans I have for Drupal's database system in Drupal 7 lately, without going into a great deal of detail. For the most part, I've been trying to avoid distracting people, myself included, from the considerable work still remaining on Drupal 6. However, there has been recent work and discussion of making post-freeze changes to Drupal 6's database system, and even backporting them to Drupal 5. Those changes revolve mostly around database replication, which Drupal currently doesn't support in any meaningful way. That becomes important, though, on very heavy sites like, say, I don't know, Drupal.org. :-)

Those changes, though, impact the API changes we can make in Drupal 7. (OK technically they don't, since we change APIs all the time, but if we can set things up so as to minimize API changes over time that does make life easier for everyone.) For that reason, at Dries suggestion, I'm going to try and lay out now a skeleton of what I'm planning for Drupal 7's database system and how we can start adding replication support to Drupal 6 in a way that flows into it.

Lullabot's Jeff Eaton has been talking about "Glue Code" lately; that's the extra little bit of code you write to make module A talk to module B to add that last little bit to that View you setup with that CCK-based node to make it just right. He's started spinning some of it off into modules, like Top Node, and asked for other people's favorite glue. Here's mine. :-)

What a week it's been! Eight days ago, we launched GoPHP5.org to try and break the stalemate that kept PHP 4 on past its sell-by date. At launch, we had a half-dozen projects and about 10 hosts that had signed up.

What a difference a week makes.