News and announcements

Automated testing has greatly improved the Drupal core development process. With automated testing over 24,500 unique core patches have been reviewed, and almost 19,000 test assertions are now run against every core patch. The result has been faster development cycle, more stable releases, and the ability to add features more quickly to Drupal core.

The benefits of automated testing are now available for contributed module developers and Drupal site owners through the addition of new functionality to the qa.drupal.org and the automated testing framework (PIFR) that integrates with Drupal core.

The leaders of the Drupal quality assurance project are holding a webinar and sprint to help contributed module developers and Drupal site owners benefit from this automated testing.

• Webinar: April 1st, 1PM EST (Webinar registration)
• Sprint: Sunday, April 18th, Drupalcon San Francisco, 9AM, Coder Lounge

DrupalCon 2010 is in sight! In less than 30 days over 2,000 Drupal fans will descend upon the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

The final schedule has been posted, so get ready to plan your DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 experience. Sign-in, and then sign-up for your favorite sessions! http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule

This year, the hottest sessions at DrupalCon will cover topics such as: Whitehouse.gov's use of Drupal, Facebook applications, Twitter integration, iPhone apps and Web services, cloud computing, e-commerce, the latest trends in Web design, how to get started with Drupal, and much, much more. All sessions fall into one of six tracks including First Impressions, Design & Usability, Code-Free Success, Technical Details, Leveraging Drupal for Business, and Providing Professional Drupal Services.

Registration for DrupalCon San Francisco is only $195 through March 25. After that, it goes up to $225. All attendees will be able to participate in three full days of sessions and seminars led by the best and brightest minds in the Drupal community.

Register at https://sf2010.drupal.org/registration

We would like to extend a huge thank you to the DrupalCon 2010 sponsors. This event wouldn't be as amazing without their support.

Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 4 is available now!

Our second Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the third alpha version of Drupal 7.x 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 we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

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. We'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. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

This alpha version should not be used for production sites. We'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. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.