API

The staging site for API.drupal.org is ready for testing. We have added the theme from Drupal.org’s redesign and documentation from classes. Behind the scenes there is a new PHP parser, project support, and automation with Hudson. This is a good test case for the latest Drupal.org infrastructure work, and has been great to work with. Please note problems in this issue queue.

The API module is almost ready to show classes and many more improvements on api.drupal.org. It is not quite ready yet; everything is in the database, but menu callbacks and template are needed to show the classes.

I’m looking for all bugs and criticals to be fixed and then, after a bit of testing, api.drupal.org can finally be upgraded. The configuration I’m using is

There is new support for projects. We will start off small, just Devel and Examples. The goal is all of contrib, but the module needs some changes to easily handle that volume.

The PHP parser was separated from documentation parsing and replaced with Grammar Parser, which goes toward fixing many bugs and the class & interface support.

There is a growing set of unit tests, which were unfortunately written after these refactorings. API is well-suited to testing since it is a parser with well-defined input and output. There are plenty of possibilities and testing will help make those happen. But not until the next release cycle, this one is already too long.

Thanks to

• Jennifer Hodgdon for helping out in the issue queue.
• Jim Berry for Grammar Parser.
• Randy Fay for pulling together examples.

One of the common requests for API.drupal.org is comments, like PHP has. With some help from chx, this is finally almost a reality. But I need your help; this uses a new single sign-on system and has a number of changes throughout the module.

I have been focusing on making the site faster. The auto-complete works at the speed of JavaScript, not AJAX. Short URLs, like http://api.drupal.org/hook_menu will work. OpenSearch plugins work with your browser.

If you have a few minutes, take an early look at the changes and make sure everything works before this all goes live.

Here is Drupal’s doc comment coverage:

Except for the lack of objects, doing relatively well, but there are a few undocumented files: Read more

I talked with a few people interested in API.drupal.org improvements at DrupalCon D.C. This post outlines the details of what I want to see done. Some tasks, like commenting on API pages, seem simple, however there are time-consuming details.

This comprehensive list is a lot of work. It will not get done quickly without help. I am organizing a Drupal.org redesign sprint April 8 to 11 or 12 in San Francisco, some API module work will likely be done April 11 and 12. Email me if you are interested in attending. I will be attending the documentation planning sprint in Toronto to work with the larger documentation project.

I would like to see more people, particularly Drupal shops, using API module. More users means more contributors. For example, Development Seed is trying out API with Spaces on their Code site. I talked with Young about the implementation and the scalability to 4000 modules. Read more

I am speaking both Saturday and Sunday at BADCamp. Saturday I will be talking about Drupal Development Tools and Resources with Matt Cheney. We will demo tools we help build, like Drupal’s API reference and Drupal for Firebug, and other great tools we use to help build sites smarter and faster.

Sunday I will be talking about Importing data with job queue and import manager. I have done this presentation in a few different forms before, at DrupalCon Boston, NewTools Drupal Day and a SFDUG meeting. This presentation will be more-technical than the others and explain how you can queue and manage jobs with Job queue and Import manager.

As always, I will be on the lookout for people interested in Drupal usability and improving the API module.

The Job queue issue queue has been quiet and I have been testing it with the development version of the API module, so it is time for a Drupal 6 release.