Events

Hello! Bdragon here.

As I'm sure everyone who's tried to use some of the more advanced features of Category with Category_menu knows, Category_menu needs some serious love.

I have opened a task here to discuss the future of Category_menu.

Please drop by and post your ideas, suggestions, rants, or experiences!

The categoryi module now has a new owner and chief maintainer: bdragon (a.k.a. Brandon Bergren)! Bdragon has made himself recognised as a valuable member of the Drupal developer community, and over the past several months he has helped out significantly in bug fixing and issue queue cleaning for the category module. Please join me in welcoming Bdragon to his new role.

I am pleased to announce that version 1.1 of the categoryi module is now available. This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of non-critical bugs in the category and related modules. There is no new functionality in this release. The release is available both for Drupal 5 and for Drupal 4.7.

Over the past three months or so, the development of the categoryi module has basically ground to a halt. This happened because I have been very busy working on another of my Drupal projects, the Import / Export API module, as part of the 2006 Google Summer of Code. Unfortunately, I am still the only real maintainer of the module, and so when I'm not around, not very much happens.

During my "absence", the bug queue for the category module grew tremendously, into the monster that it currently is. This bugginess, combined with the recent lack of developer activity, has made people worried about whether the category module will continue to be maintained for the future, and about whether the many bugs that are currently in the module will be fixed. I am pleased to say that the answer is yes: the category module will continue to not only be maintained, but also improved and developed further, for at least the next version of Drupal; and the bugs that are currently plaguing the module will be fixed.

A recent set of statistics posted in a Drupal mailing list thread confirms that, of the drupal.org projects that have a 4.7 branch, the categoryi module is the 12^th most downloaded project! This places category in the same league as such long-standing Drupal favourites as the image module and the event module, and even places it ahead of the amazing up-and-coming CCK module. This is really quite stupendous, considering that the category module has been around for less than 6 months, and has managed to achieve such growth.

Great and long-anticipated news, folks: the stable 4.7 version of the categoryi module has finally been released! Many of you would say that this release is overdue, but personally I think the timing is pretty good. There are currently no outstanding critical bugs in the module's issue queue, meaning that the module is more bug-free than ever. And with the stable release of Drupal 4.7 being just around the corner, many people will be looking for a stable version of category to match.

Exciting news, categoryi-ites: the awesome folks over at Lullabot have just released a podcast that talks about the category module! In particular, Jeff Robbins was very interested in the recent developments with activeselect-powered category selection, which essentially achieves his vision of a Mac OSX-like drill down system.

This is the best publicity that the category module has ever received, and I would like to express my deepest thanks to Matt and Jeff, for spending their valuable podcast "air-time" discussing it.

All relevant bug fixes that have been made to the book or taxonomy modules over the past month, have now also been applied to the categoryi module. This brings the category module in line with its core counterparts, which have more eyes looking over them, and are therefore more likely to have patches submitted for them.

The Drupal core menu API has just been improved, with this API upgrade patch having been committed less than an hour ago. This patch was developed out of categoryi_menu needing an interface that would let it play directly with the menu database table. The category_menu_api_* functions that previously existed in category_menu have now been removed, and all calls to these functions have now been replaced with calls to the core menu API functions!

Up until now, entering the text "site:categoryi.greenash.net.au" on Google returned only one result: the front page of the site. But I just tried doing this again today, and Google now returns 4 pages of results for this query! Hooray: the site is now being indexed by big (friendly?) brother!