There are now so many contrib modules that writing custom PHP code is rarely necessary (see Dries' deprecated meme). However, people still ask coding questions on IRC when they, in reality, need a contrib module. Observing this and seeing the strain it put on the developers who work on Drupal core and contrib, we have changed #drupal on irc.freenode.net to be the channel where Drupal is worked on: core, contrib, community etc and #drupal-support is where you need to be if you are working on a specific site.

My favorite analogue for references is a huge filing cabinet where each drawer is a variable. The label on the drawer is the name of the variable, the contents of the drawer is the value of the variable. A reference is just another label on the drawer. However, in reality, there are special variables which PHP call resources. For example, for a MySQL database connection, you will only find a little note in the drawer saying "I am not a normal variable, find the special cabinet called MySQL connections, and drawer 1 there has the connection data".

So, you need Coder to help you porting a module to Drupal 7? We have a release for you. You can't port without Views up and running? We have a tarball for you. Any other excuses for not having your module ported right now to Drupal 7?

This error message can mean one of the following:

1. There was an exception while handling an exception.
2. There was an exception while running a destructor.
3. There was an exception while closing the session.
4. There was an exception while running a shutdown function.

Wish I had more time to prep for this talk. Nevertheless, it's very important.

The biggest problem with the Drupal 7 usability process is communication. To quote Bojhan "I think its essential to recognize that with how the feedback process was handled during D7UX, we demotivated a crucial group: our core developers". Indeed. Lost in the several hundreds of comments in this or that d7ux.org blog post and getting no feedback which we were used to in the issue queue caused a lot of people to throw up hands and walk.

Again in Bojhan's blog post "in most discussions, developers assume that design proposals are ill-informed…" to which Eaton answers in the comments "and designers, in most discussions, assume that developers are visually illiterate and uneducated about UX matters".

At DrupalCon I got many stares, photos and too few discussions about my keyboard and mouse so I thought I should do a quick writeup. The keyboard is a Kinesis Freestyle, which in itself is a great thing: it's a traditional layout split keyboard. You can set it to be shoulder-wide and then type in a much more natural position already. I have added an Ascent to it which allows you to set up the keyboard 20-90 degrees.

I am very excited to announce that our contrib sprint will have a very special guest: Damien Tournoud (DamZ). At last count, Damien had the most patches submitted for Drupal 7. He is one of our PostgreSQL and SQLite maintainers and had quite a role in the testing effort too. To all North Americans, here is your chance to meet him if you can't make it to Paris!

Drupal 7 is going to be frozen on September 1. Past that, we will fix focus on bugfixing and porting contributed modules. The so-called D7CX movement wants to see as many contributed modules as possible be ready by the time Drupal 7.0 is released. NowPublic fully supports this movement and to further it, we will hold a contrib upgrade sprint in the NowPublic offices in Vancouver, BC on the October 11-1217-18 weekend (rescheduled to avoid a conflict with DrupalCamp PDX). As usual, we provide wifi, power, pizza, drinks and... chocolate! Come by, it will be awesome. If you have not had the chance yet to learn about the new field API or the new database layer, this is an excellent time.

Because of a bug in the Drupal 7 PostgreSQL chain (either in PDO or the database) BIGINT handling is not fixed in today's Drupal 6 release. And you wonder why I hate that database.