Tomorrow I get on a plane to fly to New Orleans to enjoy a few days before the Do It With Drupal seminar, where I'll be speaking about Views and hoping not to embarass myself too much. And try to figure out how I'm going to get all the work done that I have to do before the end of the year. Still, I've never been to New Orleans, so it should be fun.

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.

Packt Publishing has recently been holding their annual CMS Awards which are determined by a combination of public voting and private judging. This year they introduced a new category, allowing community members from each CMS to vote for an "MVP" to honor those who the community believes should be recognized as providing the most valuable contributions to the project.

I can imagine that there were many choices in the voting, as we have a large community full of some very dedicated people who spend every day furthering the cause of Drupal, but at the end of the voting I was selected as Drupal's MVP, on the strength of the Views module combined with the other things I do. (Also mentioned here)

I am extremely honored to get this award, but I want to make sure that this does not diminish the hardworking contributions of dozens of others who make Drupal what it is. Everyone knows Dries Buytaert, of course, who has spent the last 7 or 8 years of his life making Drupal what it is and is looking to continue to do so as long as it remains viable. And everyone knows Angela Byron, AKA webchick, who was recently honored for her contributions and they are richly deserved! But there are also people like, and forgive me for dropping out an incomplete list, but Jeff Eaton, Karoly Negyesi, Derek Wright, Addison Berry, Greg Knaddison, Nathaniel Catchpole, Daniel Kudwien, Michelle Cox, Kieran Lal, Steven Peck, Gerhard Killesreiter, Narayan Newton and I could go on but I don't have all day to write this who are contributing a great deal of their time and energy into Drupal and their contributions are vital for the functioning of this ecosystem.

I'm honored to receive this award, but it's very important to remember that there isn't, really, a single Most Valuable Person in our community, but there are a lot of very valuable people in this community. I thank everyone who voted for me, and I thank everyone in the community who have made the way of life I currently lead even possible. Drupal is built upon the strength of this community, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

I don't normally make political statements on this blog, but this issue is so important I feel like I should.

I wonder how much crossover there is in the Drupal users and role playing gamers crowds. I'm contemplating running a Paranoia RPG one-shot next DrupalCon. Who'd be interested? (If you don't know what Paranoia RPG is, you probably aren't all that interested, but the brief description is that it's a Dungeons & Dragons type game in a dark future run by a paranoid computer. There's lots of intrigue, betrayal and death. It's a dark dark dark humor game, and it's basically impossible to meet the mission objectives and completing them isn't really the point.)

Thanks very much to the hard work of Sam Boyer, we have managed to release an alpha version of Panels 2 for Drupal 6! Yes, it's finally here!

There are a series of known issues which you can find in the release notes so I wouldn't say this is 'ready' but it's ready for people to start fiddling with, at least. We're to the point where developers can start generating patches to fix stuff, too.

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'll be on vacation until Sunday.

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