I was talking with Doug Green today a little bit about Drupal releases and he reminded me that Dries' keynote in Barcelona discussed the last push to release Drupal 6. For D7 it has taken two years. Each release, is of course, a community effort and sprints are essential for pushing the Drupal project forward.

Watching the Drupalcamp CO forums, it became clear that there was a desire for a sprint. So, as an addendum to Drupalcamp CO, Examiner.com decided to host a Drupal 7 code sprint at the Examiner offices. The Examiner.com has a great deal invested in the use of Drupal 7 and MongoDB. This has extended to retaining some amazing Drupal talent including several of the top contributors to the Drupal 7 project. Driving towards camp, there were over 60ish critical core bugs preventing D7 from achieving release candidate status. After camp, the number had reduced to about 50 thanks to the chx coder lounge. A significant number of these core bugs affect the examiner project so we wanted to help with them.

Once we decided to host the team promoted the event using:

1. The camp forum
2. My personal blog as it is included on the Planet
3. Twitter and Facebook
4. Direct contact with folks in #drupal and #drupal-colorado
5. Announcements at the beginning of each camp day and in the closing remarks

We ordered fruit, pastries and coffee for the morning. We ordered a bunch of pizzas and salad for lunch. We waited to see who would show up. I was pretty happy with the turnout. What a great group of core hackers! Thank you for coming.

• chx
• rfay
• quicksketch
• davexoxide
• zarabadoo
• ultimateboy
• alasda
• coltrane
• jcfiala

By the end of the sprint, the number of critical bugs had dropped to 43 with quite a few ready for review by Webchick or Dries.

If you have the time, go the critical issues list, grab a patch and roll it and respond to the thread. As of today, the criticals were back up to 51. If you are holding a camp, consider trying to set up a sprint before or after the event. Every little bit helps.

Photo Credit: thisisforever