What can a Drupal 6 maintainer do, if he would like to gain more confidence that Drupal 6 is indeed fine and ready for a 6.0 stable release? Well, pick a well used site and upgrade. This is what I started to prepare for this Monday night for drupal.hu, the Hungarian Drupal community site. It helped that we readied the Hungarian translation earlier, so that it was complete and ready to import.
Many of you know that I am employed by Acquia to work on Drupal 6 full time right now, but since Drupal 6 is nearing a release, you might have wondered what I am going to work on next.
One of the rules with Drupal.org hosted projects is to not introduce radical API changes (or depending on your understanding even new features) in point releases of stable branches of contributed modules, so you are supposed to open a new branch. The hell starts to break loose however, if you don't have an eye on what is actually happening in your branches. This happened to me and it affected the Drupal 6 translation efforts so it was just the right time yesterday to finally clean it up. Here's the story.
Several people asked me to post about the status of the localization server, so here it goes. This project was started originally by Bruno Massa, then picked up by me as part of Google Summer of Code 2007 aiming to replace the Gettext and CVS based workflow for translators, providing a fully web based translation interface. One of the cool things of working full time on Drupal at Acquia is that I have capacity for spare time developments like this one. That's great.
The news is out! The spring DrupalCon in 2008 (these spring events usually being in North America) will be in Boston! While the session program is still in the planning, one slightly hidden announcement is the conference logo contest posted: http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/logoDesignContest The page contains all the important details, the most important being that the deadline is January 25, 2008. Quite close, right?
Through the development of the Localization Server project, I decided that it is important that we use icons instead of boring text links especially that we need to communicate lots of different things and provide action buttons for multiple options in a small space.
We do not (yet?) have a graphics artist to help out here, so it turned out that whatever icon set we choose, there will be some problem with the icons size, the exact set of icons available, their color, and so on. So it occured to me that we have a huge set of symbols already in the Unicode character set which Drupal is using, so why not use those as icons?
GMail's labels, Mint's Peppermill site and others already use a trick to wrap a few tags with specific margins to get a rounded cornered button feel, and putting a Unicode symbol in as text makes for a useful button. It is definitely not as perfect as specially tailored icons, but it allows for a few neat things. Let's see...
Drupal 6 comes with a refined interface in many regards, and some of the things I love about this upcoming release are the more subtle changes. Here is a list of some changes in Drupal 6 which I think will be important but might need some time for previous users to accomodate to:
I implemented some touch ups to the design of the Drupal.hu site recently, and although Edit Illyés (one of the top contributors in our local community) noticed that something is not right in Internet Explorer 6, we did not have a chance to look into it for some time. So finally, this became my opportunity to grab and test IEs4OSX, the brother of IEs4Linux.
Part of my Dock with IE6
Thankfully, there are people, who agree that Internet Explorer testing should not require a full virtual machine running with all the Microsoft Windows operating system booted up, let alone a completely different machine with this OS installed. IEs4OSX allows users to use the Darwine (Wine for OSX) system to run Internet Explorer versions from 5.0 to 7.0. Although the 7.0 version is still admittedly in beta stage. It run fine for me on Ubuntu with IEs4Linux, but my Mac runs on high CPU loads with it, and no page load ever finishes.
After all, this fine project (and some CSS modifications) saved Drupal.hu from going with the broken layout for IE6 users through the holidays.
This post has been reposted from an Internet Archive copy in 2020. Included are the first Acquia logo and Marc Robinsone's independent fan wallpaper creations at the time.
I am very happy that the time has finally come for me to let everyone know that I'm employed by Acquia. This company is going to do great things for Drupal and joining as an engineer working on Drupal core is a dream coming true. Let me share how it all happened.
The current Drupal process of translating with Gettext PO files, trying to get them into CVS before a release file is generated and then going over hops to update it properly is far from ideal. There are lots of drawbacks, and I started working on a web interface this summer, sponsored by the Google Summer of Code program to improve this situation. Unfortunately the server is not yet ready for prime time (on drupal.org), but there are a number of beta testing servers where some translation teams already try to leverage the cool things this tool offers, so I have lots of feedback on the issue queue.
In the last two weeks, I spent a sizable amount of my free time on improving the navigation user interface, and adding team features to the localization server, which resulted in a huge changeset, and consequently an 5.x-1.0-alpha2 release of the module, which is now available for download.
I put in a lot of thought into designing an interface which is both easier on the newcomers and on the experienced translators, but honestly I focused more on the experienced translators with as easy access to their work as possible, implementing "quick jump forms", direct linking possibility to the translation filter pages, and so on. Note that I am not a professional interface designer, I make plans up as I go along, based on user feedback and my own focus areas.
While there is still lot of room for improvement, I believe this user interface update makes using the application easier. I tried to concentrate on emphasizing the application aspects, but honestly this is not easy when you don't have control over the theme your application is displayed with. I played with adding a web application theme into the mix and requiring that for Localization Server onwards, but then decided that this can be done later if desired. For now the navigation changes can live well with any theme not exactly focused on web applications, but web sites. I see however that in the not so distant future, I might need to tie the interface to a theme, because that allows proper focus on a usable application interface.
Check out some screenshots of how the current interface looks on my Flickr account. Next up is fixing some remaining bugs, as well as new bugs introduced with this navigation interface update and finally improving on the translation interface itself.
