Those who have been concerned that there would be no Panels for Drupal 7 can rest a little easier. Today I made alpha releases for both Panels and the Chaos Tool Suite. There's still a few bugs, and there's still a bunch of work left to do, but we're to the point where it seems to be at least basically usable.

Sep 13-15, 8 of us met at the Commerce Guys facility in San Francisco for a 3 day code sprint:

• Me! (Hi there)
• Sam Boyer
• James Gilliland
• Kris Vanderwater
• Jen Lampton
• Jon Skulski

Plus, several folks joined us in IRC, in particular

• Alex Barth
• Young Hahn
• Jeff Miccolis

...and embarassingly, at least two more people provided git requests whose identities I can't remember...

I really want to sincerely thank everyone who attended the sprint and the sponsors of the sprint (iO1, Chapter Three and Commerce Guys) for making all of this possible. I also wish I'd made it a four day sprint, this probably would've been done a lot faster if it had.

We worked together in a git repository (CTools and Panels) which really, drastically made our lives a lot better. For the most part, this is a straight up port with few changes, but we did make two really interesting changes:

1. All plugin types must now be declared via hook_ctools_plugin_type(). This faciliates automatic class registering plus it lets us figure out who owns what plugin types a lot more easily. This doesn't affect modules that implement plugins at all, just modules that create new plugin types.
2. For some plugins, the UI for configuring the plugin is changing to what I hope to be a more standard way of doing things. Context and Relationship plugins already made this change, but it was taking long enough that I halted the change in favor of just getting the port done. Doing this also included creating a caching plugin to get rid of some nasty callbacks I have, that hopefully nobody but the deepest in the logic ever have to care about.

I also have an array of issues generated from this that I still need to post in a spreadsheet.

One good news is that some of the core tools have some tests! The bad news is that only some of the core tools have tests. Lots of the system is completely devoid of automated testing, and we need a bunch more.

I haven't ported Panels Everywhere yet. I need to get to that and give it a solid push.

Anyone who'd like to help us get these pieces of software solid...this is now the time!

[Edit: It should go without saying, but don't file bug reports on my blog. That's useless.]