Drupal 4.7 Beta 3 was released on Monday. Since then people have been poking, prodding and testing to see what portions are solid and where there are still chinks. Starting Wednesday I set it up on several sites and have been quite impressed. The updater and its new Ajax interface continue to improve. Looking through the list of bugs at Drupal.org there don't seem to be many of great consequence. Others will doubtless crop up, but it is great to see such a great release being baked.

As expected Steve Jobs' Keynote Address to the Macworld conference brought new Intel based iMacs and Powerbooks. And of course you can go watch the video as a streaming show. However there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get it downloaded to the great new iPod Video.

CNet News calls the new 700w a Frankensteinian mishmash. At CES yesterday I stopped by the Palm booth and took a minute to try one out. The first impression is great. It seems like an improved Treo 650 that has taken the best of physical characteristics from the Blackberry and the Treo 650. Testing it proved somewhat more difficult. Less than a minute into trying to figure out how the new interface works it died. Dead. Maybe the battery needed charging. So plugging in the power cord it shows it's charging, and still nada. Nothing. So I'll have to depend on reviews like those such as CNet and so far they're less than impressive.

Stop asking when things will be done and start contributing is one of the messages in Bert Boerland's post Done is a four letter word on the Drupal project. There is a lot of truth in what he says. Open source projects like Drupal are made better with more cooks, not less. This is true. As there usually is, however, there is more to the story.

Backtracking the Drupal project the code freeze for the next release (4.7.0) was scheduled for September 1 and then pushed back to September 15. In the same announcement it was noted that a 4.7.0 release might take "several weeks" after the code freeze. And, now several months later here we sit without a released 4.7 and little progress. Though the latter bit, about little progress, isn't correct. The feeling to many people, namely the many folks implementing Drupal on servers around the world, those folks checking to see if this next great version of this great tool, don't see much progress. November came and went with more hopeful talk and now we're into the new year with Beta 2 aging a few weeks.

While it can be really frustrating watching and waiting, helping out in the forums etc. the frustrating part is feeling like little progress is being made. The truth is that gobs of work are being done each and every day. However, if like many Drupal users you don't get into the nittiy gritty details it seems to be posts every few months, or weeks, that speak optimistically of an upcoming release punctuated by waits that grow ever longer in the mind's eye. While it takes a little digging at least with open development processes you can see proof of progress if you take the time to look for it. On the other hand with closed development processes it's a different deal. Read more about Four letter word