Dave Reid

In the last week leading up to the end of the Drupal 7 code slush, there has been a flurry of work and love going into core's Contact module. I'd like to share what has been going on with everyone else.

Anonymous user access to personal contact forms

Contact module provides personal contact forms that allow users to contact other users on the site (e.g. user/1/contact). Unfortunately if you wanted to allow anonymous users to be able to contact users in the same manner, it just wasn't possible. In Drupal core, we should not limit functionality from anonymous users, but rather features should be linked to permissions for the site administrator to choose who can do what.

This feature request was originally posted on April 11, 2006 and was nearing a rivalry with the DBTNG issue for the highest number of comments for an issue. Obviously lots of people were interested in or needed this feature. I'm proud to announce that on the issue's exact three-and-a-half year anniversary, it has finally been committed to core! For those of you interested in this for Drupal 6, I am working on back-porting this functionality into the Anonymous Contact module.

This was Contact module's own personal node/8 so we can finally let it rest in peace. There were tons of people helping with that issue and I'd like to help recognize them. The following users all helped post patches and kept the issue driving: karschsp, matt@antinomia, David Lesieur, Owen Barton, pwolanin, TBarregren, coltrane, mrtoner, deviantintegral, rleigh, swaroopch, and jonhinkle. Several other people helped review: mfer, scottrigby, greg.harvey, binford2k. I could go on forever so I apologize if I left you out.

Official maintainer

I've been posting and reviewing patches for contact.module for a while now and was starting to feel personally responsible for it, so I asked to be added as the official maintainer and it was approved! I'm excited to be helping drive long-needed improvements and bug fixes to a module that doesn't get as much recognition as it's bigger brother modules. I'd also like to thank users gpk and andypost for helping out in several issues. Read more

I know it seems like a far distance away and as much as you'd like to ignore it, Drupal 7 is coming and it will be awesome. Some ambitious developers have actually started with Drupal 7 version of their modules, but what if you just want to get a little head start? I'll show you a few ways that you can help prepare your Drupal 6 modules now to help make life easier when you full port to Drupal 7 later on. To see a list of all the current 6.x to 7.x module changes, view http://drupal.org/node/224333. Read more

Greg Knaddison at Growing Venture Solutions recently computed statistics for who are the top patchers and drivers for Drupal 7 so far (see full results here). Guess who's #4? Me! Occasionally it feels nice to be noticed. :)

Big congrats goes to catch, who is rocking things out at #1 and I will also most likely be working on a project with in the near future. There are also a lot of people providing 1-2 patches that are helping making Drupal 7, so let's keep building momentum and make this release the best yet!