Advanced Forum & Advanced Profile Kit status report

[Note: The project that was supposed to fund some of this collapsed which means everything is going to take longer. I'm still working on the modules and will get to 1.0 soon as I'm able but I'm doing this for free so it's not top priority anymore. I'm hoping to have 1.0 of everything except possibly APK for D6 out in February. APK D6 depends on exactly how much I decide to put in the 1.0.]

This post is for people who use or are thinking of using Advanced Forum and/or Advanced Profile Kit. It contains important information to navigate the version mess I have going on right now.

The current supported versions are AF Alpha 16 (D5 & D6) and APK beta 1 (D5). If you are using these modules on a live site, stick with those versions until we get past this reshuffling. I will be doing "unstable" releases while I get them into shape. You'll know it's safe to upgrade when I go back to named alpha/beta releases. Hopefully this won't take more than a couple more weeks but it's hard to predict with my sporadic time to work on this. I am getting sponsored to work on the D6 version of APK for the bits the client's site needs but there's also bits that won't be going into APK that pull my focus away from it. I haven't abandoned the D5 versions but they aren't getting as much attention as my focus is on D6 and so are lagging behind.

If you are looking to help test the new versions, the rest of this will tell you what you need to know. If you aren't comfortable running devel and giving me reproducable steps, this isn't for you. These instructions are for both D6 and D5 but D6 is farther along at this point and will work better as D5 still needs some things backported to it. Once I've done that, I'll release "unstables" for D5 as well to make testing easier.

Advanced Forum:

AF Now requires the new Author Pane module. This new dependency isn't new code; I took the code out of AF and moved it to a new module. So it's not adding to the amount of code you're using. I didn't want to have AF dependent on anything, but I didn't have a choice.

You will want to disable AF on the modules page, delete any *author-pane.inc files you copied to other module directories, then clear your cache, then delete the entire directory, then untar the new AF as well as AP, then re-enable AF and enable AP. Making the jump without clearing the cache will result in errors as it looks for the author pane files in the wrong project. This will hopefully be fixed before I resume normal releases.

There is a known issue with the theme registry when devel isn't installed that I need to hunt down so please don't report that again unless you're attaching a patch. :) Other than that, AF unstable seems to be working ok in D6. I haven't done recent testing in D5.

Advanced Profile Kit:

I haven't tested the D5 version in a while and am really not sure what shape it's in. Best to wait until I get an unstable out of that. [Edit Jan 10: Because I have two live D5 sites to use as guinea pigs, the D5 versions got enough testing that I went ahead and made new alpha/beta releases instead of unstables.]

The D6 version is coming along nicely, but it's waiting on some code in other modules:

http://drupal.org/project/content_profile Jan 4 or later for user -> profile node panels relationship
http://drupal.org/node/349987 to get fieldgroups working in panels
http://drupal.org/node/210987 for activity

As with AF, APK now requires Author Pane. If you have AF on the same test site, that needs to be upgraded at the same time or you'll run into errors when the code from AF collides with the code in AP.

I think that covers everything you need to know to test the new versions. I am actively working on all of these and will be until either I get full 1.0 releases of everything out or my brain explodes, whichever comes first. So the devs will continue to be more unstable than the unstables. Use them with care and, remember, not on a live site. I don't want to be responsible for crashing anyone's live site.

Michelle