New -dev release available (2011 April 18)

There's a new Commons release available; it's what's known in the Drupal world as a "-dev" release.  In our case, it means that it's got a lot of new stuff in it that's pretty well locked down, but:

• There's still new capabilities intended prior to making it an -alpha or -beta candidate;
• Developers reserve the right to "break" things that are implemented in the -dev release as they add these new capabilities, with no upgrade path planned from -dev release to -dev release; and
• While it is tested by the developers, this release hasn't had real deployment-grade testing yet.

However, there's lots of new stuff in this release.  You can download the release now, and read the details in the Release Notes; but the main themes of this release are:

1. Simplified user experience. We've had plenty of feedback about the amount of content contained in the group home page layout. While the page designs were inspired by other social business software solutions, many found the group home pages to simply have too much information, and what was there wasn't as useful as they'd have liked.  So this release reconstructs the group home pages; there are now only 2 columns, and the main column contains (primarily) the contents of the old Recent Activity block. This block uses the Heartbeat module, and we think in the coming days we can coax a bit more out of the Heartbeat module to make the information in this block increasingly useful.  We've taken the old "Recent Content" block and broken it into per-content-type blocks in the sidebar.  I'm not sure we're accomplishing all that's possible yet; but this new layout will reduce the complexity of the group home page, and will allow us to fine-tune the contents in coming releases.

   Note that we've also rearranged the user's profile pages, following similar coments about what people wanted from the profile pages.  I think the changes we include here are also only the first step to improving the usefulness of the profile pages.  It's arguable that within a release or two, the profile page will have the bulk of the functionality that the Dashboard pages, and the latter should disapper.  But we're not quite ready to make those go away, I think.  We have a little more work to do to differentiate - or combine - the two.

2. New theme. Many people inexperienced in Drupal thought that the old Acquia Commons theme was the only way that Commons could look.  Those with experience knew you could have different Themes for Commons, but few were fully capable of handling the full feature set of Commons.

   So we've included a new theme - Commons Connect - in this release. You'll find it has a pretty different look & feel from the first Commons theme (which still remains in the distribution). The point of this new theme is not only to give you a second choice, but demonstrate how a new theme can completely change the feel of a Commons site - yet still retain all the functionality of the underlying solution.

3. Increased customizability. A foundation goal of Commons is to continue to make Commons as modular and customizable as possible, yet still retaining the important core components of a community site. This release increases the customizability aspect in an important way by including og_features. This new module enables group administrators to enable / disable (Commons) Features differently per-group.  For instance, if a group does not need Blog pages, those can be turned off for that group, which removes the tab along the top of the group home page, and removes the link to create new Blog content.

   Another element of customizability change is notable.  Previous versions of Drupal Commons used both Panels and Context.  There initially seemed to be good reasons to use both. But many people were confused about which to use when.  So in this release, we've pulled out Panels and are using Context completely for page layout. If you don't know it, take the time to learn it; it's pretty powerful.

4. Admin module (vs. admin toolbar). Because we switched to Context, we also needed to provide a way for people to manage page layouts using Commons - e.g. what the stacking order for sideblocks is supposed to be, etc.  To do this, we really needed to include the Admin module. And since its functionality is a 100% overlap with Admin Toolbar, and since we needed Admin (module) for Context layout control, we decided to swap the two. If you haven't encountered the Admin module before, (while you're logged in as an Admin) when viewing any page, click the wrench icon on the top-right corner of the page and click on "Context editor". From there, you can edit the blocks and their layout for every page.

We're not quite done yet. There are still a handful of new things we want to add to this release. But there are good reasons to put out a -dev release before an -alpha or -beta:

• The UX changes are widespread enough that site builders that have created Commons sites already may need some time to sort out how these changes should be folded into their existing sites;
• Because of the widespread changes, we should start tracking bugs earlier than an -alpha or -beta release.

If you're interested in providing testing feedback (read "bug reports"), go download the -dev release, then request to be granted access to the Google spreadsheet the community participants are using to develop this release.  The first tab in this spreadsheet gives you notes on how to test this release.  NOTE: In addition to simply requesting access, please add a comment here ON THIS PAGE indicating:

• Your drupal.org user ID;
• Your experience level with Commons;
• What you expect to be able to do - e.g. point-click to test, and report bugs; or actually submit theme or code patches to fix bugs you might find.

We definitely want as many testers as possible, but we'd prefer to have those who have some Commons (or at least Drupal) experience in order to reduce the number of reported issues that are merely reporting how Drupal works (by default).  Thanks in advance to all who provide input and feedback for this release.