I'm pretty impressed at all the excitement coming out of the whole design4drupal initiative. Lots of people are talking, and the chatter is everywhere. Unfortunately, from my perspective, it's looking like it may actually turn out to be one of the most damaging things that can happen to Drupal, and this one is bothering me at a very deep level. And perhaps this is something that's been building up, because I have definitely noticed my enthusiasm waning over the last year, and things like this are really putting a bullet into the heart of it.

I've spent a lot of my 'between' time thinking about what I want to see for the next major revisions of Views, and I've finally decided to sit down and actually create a road map. Views 3 isn't like Views 2 in the sense that there will be a rewrite. On the contrary, I'm really happy with the foundation of Views 2 and I believe that we have a solid system for building on. What I'm unhappy with are features that got left out, or that I didn't even know we would need.

I'd like to compile a list of modules that use Views heavily (examples: Flag, Views Bulk Operations, Views Attach, Views Reference) with a blurb about each of them. The blurb would contain a neutral description of what they do, and then a non-neutral comment on the quality and maintenance level of the modules. Obviously the latter is a judgment call and I don't expect it to be completely dead on, but I would like to note projects that are well known to rarely get bugs fixed. Another comment might be known usage levels, some of which can be gleaned from the shiny new usage statistics.

Completely by happenstance, I just discovered that they very first commit for Views was three years ago today. Technically Views is either a little older or a little younger than that, depending upon how you look at it; about a week before I had posted the code to a forum post on drupal.org to request comments, though the code itself was hosted on my server and that particular setup has long since been changed to something else.

I have just checked in a major change to the Views API. Details can be found in the advanced help under api.html (and the handlers and plugins) pages, but the short version is that all handlers and plugins are now separated into their own files in order to conserve memory and not loaded unneeded code. This required implementing an API versioning system, and the upshot of this is that a new hook must be implemented by all Views modules: hook_views_api(). Without the proper use of this hook, the *.views.inc files will not be included.

I have to say, being the sole maintainer of a project the size, complexity and popularity of Views is one of those experiences that I can't really recommend to most developers. It requires a lot of skills and talents, many of which I possess. Just not all the time.

Yay! I wanted this to happen long ago, but by delaying we managed to get Views, CCK and OG to all roll release candidates on the same day!

Release announcement here: http://drupal.org/node/277856

Greg Knaddison (greggles) over at masteringdrupal.com did a screencast talking about some of the big changes in Views 2. If you haven't looked at Views 2 yet, it's worth a look to see what's changed.

I don't have a lot of time for Views 1 right now, but there are a couple of bugs in Views 1.6 that really need to be fixed. I've been hoping for a year now that someone would volunteer to write these patches, but no one has.

Ironically, both of the patches I need relate to taxonomy, and both of these problems exist because Views is trying to use Drupal's API but the API is simply not adequate to Views' needs.

Ok, if the first sentence of your comment is "I'm sorry, this isn't really related to this post" I'm going to delete your comment without reading it.

If you are having a problem with a module, http://drupal.org/support -- your resources are there. My blog -- and as far as I know, pretty much all blogs -- are not a Q&A. Nor is my email box, for those of you have forgotten my rant on that topic from last year.

Forums. Issue queue. These are where support requests go. Thanks.