Early this morning, just past midnight my time, I put out 1.0 releases of Advanced Forum, Advanced Profile Kit, and Author Pane in both D5 and D6 with the exception of APK D6 which still needs a lot of work. I was trying for a 4/1 release just for fun but they're showing up as 3/31 for me (though one person reported it says 4/1 for them). If you've been using the RCs, there's not much change. I've waited until the bug reports stopped on the RCs before doing the release and I haven't made major changes for a while. If you're one of those folks the usage stats reports on the early alphas, I'm afraid it's going to be a rough upgrade.

These releases were a long time coming. Advanced Forum started out as a modified Flatforum on Coulee Region Online two years ago and has been a module of its own since November of 2007. Advanced Profile Kit started out as a tutorial based on the profiles on Coulee Region Online and has been a module since January of 2008. Author Pane is the new kid on the block but is actually bits of AF & APK pulled out so they could be shared. I've been working on these fairly constantly all that time, slowly adding features and working out the bugs. There is still much work to do on Advanced Forum but it has gathered so many users I felt it was time to make a cutoff point so they would have a solid release.

Which brings us to the future. The D5 line is done as I am leaving D5 behind on all my sites and don't care to work with it anymore. I will continue to support it and provide bug fixes until D7 is released but it's definitely on maintenance only mode for me. D6, however, still has much work to do. Advanced Forum will be getting a 2.x branch soon to file feature requests against and I will start in on them in a month or two (I need a short break). For Advanced Profile Kit, I plan on making the move to Panels 3 and finishing up a more limited feature set to give it a 1.0 release. Then that, too, will get a 2.x branch to start in on some of the plans I have to make it live up to the "advanced" in its name.

So this isn't an end to the long journey but merely a milestone. I'm excited to continue taking Drupal's forums and profiles to the next level and hope you all will keep on the journey with me to make these modules the best they can be.

Thank you all for your continued support. Without users, these modules would not be where they are today.

Michelle

It has been a long and twisty road since I first set out to build a community site for the greater La Crosse, Wisconsin area (also known as the Coulee Region) over two years ago. And it's a road that I continue to travel. Coulee Region ONLINE, as I call my site, has been running (or maybe limping) for most of those two years on Drupal 5 but is in a constant state of undone filled with glitches and promises of good things to come Real Soon Now.

Along the way I have made several aborted attempts to document the process of building the site. Some of it turned out to be useful like the user profile tutorials that eventually turned into Advanced Profile Kit. And then there was my frustrations with flatforum that turned into Advanced Forum. Some of it was not so good like my promising to write up how to create an area directory that never went farther than a tease of Views dumps.

As I approach the second anniversary of launching my "public alpha" (beta would be too kind) I find myself not wanting to start a third year of making excuses for a site that doesn't quite work right. So I am taking a break from freelancing, which has consumed too much of my time this last year, and am going to focus on making the site that's been living in my head, waiting to be expressed in Drupal. In conjunction with that, I am going to finally write that ebook that I've been dancing around for two years.

It won't be done in a hurry; even without having computer time going to freelancing I still have two young children who don't like mommy at the computer too long. I expect this will take several months to do, but I will get there, slow and steady. I have a goal, I have the desire, and I even have an outline.

So, enough announcing what I'm going to do. Time to get doing it. :)

There are a lot of modules that make up a forum in Drupal. Advanced Forum attempts to make it easier for users by allowing many of those modules to have their stuff show up in the author section of the forum posts. It does this by making use of the preprocess system built into core of Drupal 6 (and backported into Drupal 5). For those not familiar with the preprocess system, it's a wonderful thing. For any template file on your site, any module out there can add variables to it just by implementing the preprocess hook. In this case, I'm dealing with the "author pane" template which is used by both Advanced Forum and Advanced Profile Kit. So all those modules out there only need to implement one preprocess hook and, viola, both modules get their goods.

In theory, it's an excellent way for one module to add their stuff to another. In practice, it failed miserably. Two months ago, I filed issues in seven queues (and an eighth added a bit later) giving them the hook code in a file they only needed to drop into their directory and commit. I did everything but push the button for them. All they needed to do was add this hook and their users could get their stuff into the their forum posts and profiles with no effort. I expected the maintainers would be happy I made it so easy for them.

Instead, I was mostly ignored. Two of the modules weren't interested because they're an API, though one of them finally consented that the module implementing the hook should be the one holding the code, API or not. The other offered to put it in one of their sub modules, which I was fine with, but then they never followed through. I realize everyone is busy and wasn't expecting instant results but it's been two months of users being confused, trying to understand how to get the data from these other modules to show up in their forums. Two months of me telling them they need to add the file manually because the maintainers haven't done it yet.

Finally, I had enough. Because this needs to work with both Advanced Forum and Advanced Profile Kit, pulling the hooks back into AF wasn't an option. This would make APK dependent on AF, which was unacceptable. Trying to put them in both modules would result in namespace collisions and, even if I if tested around that, tons of duplicated code. So, grudgingly, I decided the only way out of this was to create a third module.

Enter Author Pane. This module exists just to be a dependency of AF & APK and hold the code the other maintainers wouldn't touch. It seems silly to create a module to implement hooks on behalf of other modules but it was the best I could come up with. As of the next releases I do, both AF and APK will depend on this module. It seems strange to be sad about releasing a new module, but it's a sad situation. I'm very disappointed that it came to this. So many people give lip service to wanting better forums and better profiles with Drupal and, when I try to make it easier, I'm met with silence and outright resistance. What ever happened to cooperation?

Advanced Forum Alpha 12 has been released. I jumped ahead the D6 numbering so I'm using one number on both branches. Not only is it easier for me to refer to one number but it makes more sense as the module is at the same point in development on both branches and is being developed in parallel.

The theme changes in this version are huge. First off, in the D6 version, there is an entirely new way of handling "forum themes" which we now refer to as "styles" to avoid confusion with "site themes" (Thanks to merlinofchaos and sdboyer). The default styles live in the styles directory. Existing styles can be overridden by copying files to your theme. Completely new styles can be created by adding a hook to your site module. The advantage in creating a new style is that it lies outside the theme system and can be used by any theme on your site. Because of limitations in the D5 theme system, the D5 version still uses the old method of copying a style to your site's theme.

Along with the new system comes new styles. Stephanie Pakrul (aka stephthegeek), maker of professional Drupal themes stepped up to do the new base style, "Naked". We called it Naked because it gives form to your forums without adding styles that that could clash with your theme and need to be unstyled. In addition, she provided a variation called, "Naked Stacked" that places the author information pane on top, which is great for narrow themes. These two styles will provide the foundation for all future Advanced Forum styles, starting with blue_lagoon, which is also included in this alpha. Blue Lagoon, named after the Garland color set that it was designed to match (thanks again, Steph), is a basic blue style that will look good in several existing themes, such as Pixture. It also lists the colors at the top of the .css file for easy search and replace color changes.

The graphics in the old "advforum" theme, aside from the ones provided by yoroy, were a hodgepodge of files gathered from icon sharing sites. While we're still using yoroy's icons, the rest have been replaced by Dave Paris. He's provided two sets: a desaturated, recolorable set that's used in the Naked and Naked Stacked themes and a pretty, blue tinged, set that's used in Blue Lagoon. If you're using Drupal on a non English site, don't worry, there is an option to turn off the buttons with writing on the settings page.

In addition to the style changes, there have been options added to the settings page for easier customization, numerous small tweaks and fixes as well as some code clean up. I did quite a bit of testing to try and avoid releasing this alpha with a glaring bug like the last one. Even so, I'm going to hold off on any big features and focus on small additions and tweaks until this alpha has been in the wild a while. If any major bugs come up, I'll do a new alpha right away. If not, it's onwards towards version 1.

Now that the style system has settled down, I want to give a shout out to you themers out there. The more styles I can ship with Advanced Forum, the less work there is for end users to match the forums to their theme. Also, if you maintain a contributed theme, you can feel safe now including some theming for Advanced Forum. There will be minor changes to styles to add in new features but the really awful throw-your-existing-themes-away kind of changes are behind us.

I hope everyone enjoys this release. As always, if you find bugs or are looking for support, please use the issue queue.

Michelle