Is it just me or is Drupal.org down? Of course I need to start a new project quickly and wanted to get the latest beta.

Update: Must have been because it is responding now.

Update too: There is a post explaining the outages.

Stop asking when things will be done and start contributing is one of the messages in Bert Boerland's post Done is a four letter word on the Drupal project. There is a lot of truth in what he says. Open source projects like Drupal are made better with more cooks, not less. This is true. As there usually is, however, there is more to the story.

Backtracking the Drupal project the code freeze for the next release (4.7.0) was scheduled for September 1 and then pushed back to September 15. In the same announcement it was noted that a 4.7.0 release might take "several weeks" after the code freeze. And, now several months later here we sit without a released 4.7 and little progress. Though the latter bit, about little progress, isn't correct. The feeling to many people, namely the many folks implementing Drupal on servers around the world, those folks checking to see if this next great version of this great tool, don't see much progress. November came and went with more hopeful talk and now we're into the new year with Beta 2 aging a few weeks.

While it can be really frustrating watching and waiting, helping out in the forums etc. the frustrating part is feeling like little progress is being made. The truth is that gobs of work are being done each and every day. However, if like many Drupal users you don't get into the nittiy gritty details it seems to be posts every few months, or weeks, that speak optimistically of an upcoming release punctuated by waits that grow ever longer in the mind's eye. While it takes a little digging at least with open development processes you can see proof of progress if you take the time to look for it. On the other hand with closed development processes it's a different deal. Read more about Four letter word

If you clicked on the calendar archive to the right of the page in the last couple of days you'd notice it didn't allow you to choose "2006" articles.

A quick change to archive.module and all is well. The line in question is this line:

  $years = drupal_map_assoc(range(2000, 2005));

By changing the 2005 to 2006 it again works. However a better solution would include a bit more code that checks for the current year and makes it go through the current year. To save cycles the current year could be specified in a configuration file or stored in the database though each of those has their own issues associated with it.

Sitting down recently we planned the calendar into the next year. It is hard to believe Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away and another couple of weeks fall finals will be upon us.

Part of the reason for the dearth of postings here has been working on a couple of other sites. We've been working with the new version of Drupal and really need a status update on Drupal 4.7. The code freeze announced for September 1 hasn't happened yet. There is a presentation from the Amsterdam conference but as I read the notes for it I get a code freeze at the beginning of November and release candidates rolling around November 18. Hopefully more news will come soon.