Montreal Drupal meeting, January 2009

Submitted by mvc on Tue, 2009-01-13 15:11

Last night I attended a celebrity Montreal Drupal meetup, and got to meet chx, who among other things is the top contributor to Drupal core in D7. He and webchick, D7 co-maintainer, gave us an overview of what's in store in D7, which is currently planned for last quarter 2009 or first quarter 2010. The most significant change lately has been to move part of CCK into core, meaning not only that simple sites will require fewer contributed modules, but that other objects in Drupal will be able to have custom fields attached, such as users, taxonomy terms, or comments. Currently many use cases require treating these things as nodes, but this should help make modules such as usernode redundant. chx also talked about other broad changes in Drupal, such as the planned move from a forms-based code to API-based code. There's even talk about adding support for cloud computing databases like CouchDB, now that D7 includes a database abstraction layer strong enough to support SQLite for very simple, self-contained Drupal installations. Since we're a long way away from code freeze, I'm sure many other exciting features will be added in the coming months as well, but D7 is already shaping up to be a great release.

No Drupal meeting would be complete without talk of everyone's favourite contributed modules. Here are a few that came up:

  • WYSIWYG API to integrate JS editors into Drupal (for example, let them know which HTML tags the current user has permission to use) — stable releases for D5 and D6
  • Form Builder to create CCK types by dragging and dropping form elements into a preview of the node editing page — in development for D6, no stable releases yet; in consideration for D7 core
  • Image Resize Filter finds IMG tags with width and height attributes (for example, those generated by a WYSIWYG editor) and replaces them with links to an autogenerated appropriately scaled image — in development for D6, no stable releases yet

Our host Alex of Evolving Web also mentioned an interesting PHP library, phpQuery, which is a port of the jQuery DOM manipulation library to PHP. Perhaps you've never thought about doing this, but you can probably immediately see a use for it.

Thanks to all for the great meeting. We even had people who had never used Drupal before show up — they were rewarded with a copy of Lullabot's brand new O'Reilly book, Using Drupal. Hope to see you all next month!