Deprecated - Drupal core

I would just like to know if there is a problem with the blocks on the recent Drupal HEAD download? I have it running on my test site, but there seems to be a block problem, as I cannot place blocks on the BlueMarine and PushButton themes. They just don't appear?? They work fine with the Chameleon theme though, so can anybody help me out on this one?

As I would love to test out my theme for it to work with the new Drupal 4.7 but I won't be able to test it when the theme I would like to work on doesn't let me manage blocks...

I posted a question in this forum a few hours ago and it disappeared. Did someone delete it?

I want to know where I can find documentation on Drupal's distributed authorization system. Looking at the source code, it's not instaltly obvious where the login is called at all. Is there any documentation? Could someone give me the 3 sentence summary of how this works so I know where to look in the code?

I'm in the process of integrating my SMF-based site with Drupal, and I have a request:

Could you please, please PRETTY PLEASE switch away from using common variable and function names so Drupal is more easily integrated with other programs?

There are massive name collisions between Drupal and SMF - both variables and functions. They both use a key variable called $db_prefix (appears in thousands of places in hundreds of files - SMF is a large program), and they both have a database layer that prefixes every function with db_, so many functions have the same name (e.g. db_query()).

To keep myself from getting completely confused by the generic names (on top of the bug nightmare potential), I changed all the database function names on SMF to start with smf_ rather than db_, and on Drupal I changed them all to drup_. That way I'll at least be able to keep straight which database functions go with which program.

This was very non-trivial to do, plus going forward I have to edit any modules I install to use the new function names. I'm a programmer so I can do it, but many people who aren't programmers want this integration as well.

I figure you're going to tell me I should have just used the forum in Drupal, but that wasn't an option for me. My Web site is a subscription service based on a very heavily modified version of the SMF forum software. I added a lot of new features - post moderation, enhanced notifications (including an option to receive all posts in email), and paid subscriptions automated through PayPal's IPN facility and fully integrated with the SMF registration process. Payment is required for access to the forum as well as other member content, and access control is automatic in response to the notifications.

I'm probably being too impatient here, but here goes:

How is the upcoming release (4.7) doing? I've tried to follow the development threads, but am curious on the overall picture - Are any dates for the freeze and for release candidates set?

There are probably more than me eagerly postponing several new web sites/updates to be able to use the new code base. Would it be possible to disclose some of the main new features to Drupal-newbees like me? - Or do you consider that to be a spoiler? ;-)

Looking forward to the next release,

Hans

Pages are built from nodes. nodes can be built all sorts of ways. If we have a cache with entries keyed by user/page_id and a table keyed on page_id/node_id, we could deliver partially cached pages to logged on users.

Chris Messina brought up an interesting point here: http://drupal.org/node/15506 where he suggests through the mockups the idea of allowing a user to save a post as draft (or saving as 'private' and viewable to the author only). I searched around but did not see any talk about this elsewhere, besides conversations related to using node_privacy_byrole (NPBR) as an alternative.