The Release Of The Third Alpha Version Of Drupal 7.0

Written by claire Monday, 22 March 2010 09:24

Yesterday, The developer of Drupal proud to announce the release of the Drupal 7 alpha 3 version for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement they'll concentrate on how we can help ensure that Drupal 7.x is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases.

The release notes contain a list of the biggest changes. The most notable change for developers is Drupal 7 now ships with jQuery 1.4 and jQuery UI 1.8. They've also fixed a number of critical issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused passwords to be stored in plain-text under certain conditions.

This alpha version should not be used for production sites. They've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can help them reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

New Drupal Users

Are you completely (or relatively) new to Drupal? Or do you know just enough to be dangerous? Are you used to working with other content management systems and willing to lend your perspective in improving the way Drupal works? If so, you're a perfect candidate to help with usability testing and improving documentation!

As you're going through Drupal 7, take notes on things you find difficult or confusing, and translate those notes into an issue which will show up in the issue tracker. Make sure to be as clear as possible about what the problem was and provide suggestions on how to improve it -- this makes it easier for developers to help!

Testers

Do people often congratulate you on your ability to break things? Are you a creative individual who likes to experiment in unconventional ways to see what happens? Do you enjoy looking over other peoples' work and picking nits in order to make it as good as it possibly can be? If any of these apply to you, you could make a great tester!

They need testers both to try out different aspects of Drupal itself, as well as take a look at the issue queue, checking bugs to see if they're valid and testing patches to verify they work properly. Read more about setting up a testing environment and applying patches.