These are my high level design goals for Views 2.

Views 2 will be the Drupal 6 port. Views 1 will not be ported to Drupal 6; this is so we can make wholesale changes to the API at the same time there are other changes, reducing the number of complex upgrades required.

A lot of people don't realize how useful Node Queue is as a module; in part because the name doesn't do a very good job of explaining what the module does. For one thing, it almost seems like it duplicates taxonomy, or maybe bookmarks. But it does something none of those modules do: It orders your nodes completely arbitarily.

One other valuable point: Queues have a maximum size. When the queue is 'full', if a new item is added, the the last item in the queue is automatically removed.

What is this good for?

I released Panels 2 Alpha 3 today. Thanks very much to yoroy again for giving it another makeover. This time, I'm including screenshots.

I've long been of the belief that Drupal's love/hate relationship with Object Oriented programming is kind of an odd situation. Most of the time it's not really a problem, but sometimes we come so close to using OO methodology that it seems like a waste that we're not simply OO. One of the places that really shows up is the Forms API.

The design of the Forms API is exceedingly OO; but we're not using OO at all. I spent a little time thinking about it, and I knocked off an idea of what the current Forms API might look like if it were OO.

"Jesse", a blogger who apparently has just one article and either wants to build a reputation for a new venture or simply wants to be anonymous (hard to say which) posted a fairly long article on his site called 4 problems with Drupal.

I read this article, and I started out a little annoyed. It makes some false or at least misleading assertions. I immediately commented on one obvious one, and then as I thought about it, I felt a need to address the entirety of his arguments, because they are, in all, flawed.

This isn't in the Drupal tag so that it won't go to the Planet; but I want this information easily available.

I want to record this conversation; I'm also lazy so I'm not really rewriting it, but I did edit it down somewhat. In short, fago and I spoke about Views 2 and what I have planned and what he can do to help. I ended up with a pretty good summary of the things I want to do:

We're almost there with this. Only a few more days, hopefully. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it -- this is the planned destination of a crusade I've been on for several months now.

(I doubt the final product will look like this, but it's certainly a good start)

This is still very much in progress. I’m told it doesn’t work at all on Safari, and even in Firefox it has some quirks. Doesn’t even save yet. But you can drag panels around. Add content. Remove content. Pretend to configure the content.

http://panels.demo.logrus.com/

Due to a bug in 1.1 I'm releasing 1.2 a couple of weeks sooner than I had expected to.

Views 1.2 for Drupal 4.7: http://drupal.org/files/projects/views-4.7.x-1.2.tar.gz

Bugs fixed:

• 100109: Incorrect caching of 'is new' filter.
• 99849: DISTINCT could break summary views.
• 99783: Comment count didn't take into account pages. Also moved handler
  out of node where it didn't belong.

A quick review of both the #drupal IRC channel and the activity on the dev list is that, despite everything, Drupal’s new release system is a little confusing. And, truth to be told, it is a little confusing. In my [not so] humble opinion, this is not the fault of the implementation or the design of the system, but more the fault that Drupal users and developers have gotten accustomed to a system that sort of worked, but left a lot to be desired.

To start with, the original system worked well for Drupal core itself. This meant that a fair number of people, who primarily deal with core, never really got to get face to face with the problems that manifested on the contrib repository. But that’s a relatively small group of people, and all of them are very smart people. While it took some good arguing, the bulk of them were convinced that the new way is a better way, and thus the improvements actually came to pass.