Drupal news

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 30 minutes Thursday, May 9, 17:00 PDT (May 10, 0:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to remove a core hack. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

Scott Reynen has done some fun things in the Drupal community. Some notable examples:

• Coordinated many meetups in Denver ensuring they happen, with interesting topics, and tasty pizza options
• Helped to organize several Drupalcamps in Colorado (which will be June 29th/30 in 2013)
• Presents on various topics at Drupalcamps
• Helps as one of the 3 site maintainers for groups.drupal.org
• Is an active Project Application queue reviewer heavily interested in new-contributor-onboarding and project quality
• Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue
• And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Most of my Drupal time is spent building websites for clients. I’m fortunate to be able to work on projects I really care about, like the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the United Nations Development Programme. Apart from client work, I use Drupal as a platform to explore new ideas. With a wide variety of code and a huge active community, Drupal serves as a great incubator.

You’re involved with the Drupal community locally and internationally - can you describe some of the things you do and why you like them?

I co-maintain Drupal Groups (groups.drupal.org), deal with abandoned projects on Drupal.org, do some work on project review applications, help organize the local Denver Drupal meetup, actively mentor a few people, and contribute some modules. I think I like all of this because I feel like I’m actively building the future, either through directly improving the web, or by enabling other people to improve the web.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I didn’t go through the application review process to get my own Git (previously CVS) access, and didn’t realize the process existed for a long time. So I think some feeling of debt played a part in my getting involved. But I also believe the future of Drupal depends on people who aren’t yet involved, and the application process, if not handled well, can very easily be a point where we turn away this next generation of contributors.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

It’s always nice to get thanks from new contributors for my feedback, or to discover a cool new module before it even has a release. But I think my favorite moment was when klausi arrived. Before that, I felt like I had to stay actively involved or the whole process might fall apart. When klausi started doing a superhuman number of reviews, I could comfortably step away from the queue for a short (or even long) period of time and avoid both catastrophe and burnout.

Read a previous Community Spotlight about Klaus Purer (klausi).

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Commerce Registration is, I think, a great example of why the review process is important to the wider community. After some quick minor bug fixes in the review process, that project was approved and is now part of the Conference Organizing Distribution, used in every DrupalCon site. And the maintainer has gone on to contribute several other modules, a few to Drupal Commons that will be part of the next version of the Drupal Groups site. A more frustrating project review could have easily meant the Drupal community losing all of this.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

Mostly I think we just need more people with the right mindset. Right now, the “needs review” backlog is gradually disappearing, largely thanks to a lot of new reviewers. I think we just need to keep more of these reviewers involved and make sure they know, as jthorson recently wrote, “the role of reviewers in this process is that of a 'mentor', not 'traffic cop'”.

What is your favorite part about the Drupal community?

It’s rare to hear someone say “I don’t care” in the Drupal community. There’s plenty of work that goes off the rails on passionate debate over what color to paint the bike shed, and that can grow tedious. But our bike sheds are the best-painted on the web (12 coats!), because people really care. I like that.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

When I was young, I hit myself in the forehead with a boomerang. I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept, but I’d never had one actually come back. This one did, just as I was turning to see where it had landed. Stitches weren't great back then, so I still have a scar. I still have problems with tools doing what I say rather than what I expect.

Drupal 7.22, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.22 release notes for a full listing.

Download Drupal 7.22

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended. There are no major new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 includes the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

There are no security fixes in this release of Drupal core.

Bug reports

Drupal 7.x is being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports), more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.22 is a bug fix only release. The full list of changes between the 7.21 and 7.22 releases can be found by reading the 7.22 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Update notes

See the 7.22 release notes for details on important changes in this release.

Known issues

#1962780: 500 Internal server error on Apache 1.x servers after updating to Drupal 7.22: Sites running on 1.x versions of the Apache web server may experience errors after updating to Drupal 7.22. (Although Apache 1.x was deprecated by the Apache project several years ago and switching to Apache 2.x is highly recommended, Drupal 7 normally does still run on it.) A patch to fix the problem is available in the above issue, and it has been committed to the 7.x development version so it will be included in the next bug fix release.