A stable Nodewords is right around the corner

Our holiday gift to all Drupal 6 developers is the first stable release of the much maligned Nodewords module in almost three years: v6.x-1.13-rc1 v6.x-1.13-rc2 v6.x-1.13. While today's offering is just a release candidate, we will be launching the final 6.x-1.13 on New Years' Eve, marking the second anniversary of the broken 6.x-1.11 release, the source of many nightmares for Drupal developers everywhere.

This also reaffirms Bluespark Labs's commitment to Drupal 6 (and 7) and we will continue supporting it for many more years.

What happened to 6.x-1.12?

In short, we took it out behind the shed and, well...

After the last release of 6.x-1.11 on December 31st, 2009, the maintainer began a major re-engineering of the module, taking it from an already confusing three submodules to a staggering seven, making what should be a simple task into something even more convoluted. In 2010 Dave Reid and I took over maintainership of the module with the goal of stabilizing it with the intention of simplifying it later; we made some definite progress to that end.

In the spring of 2011 Nate "quicksketch" Haug, of Lullabot, Imagecache and Webform fame, suggested we scrap 6.x-1.12 entirely as it was taking the module's user hostility to whole new levels. Ultimately we agreed with Nate, but rather than scrapping the codebase entirely as there were already several thousand sites using it, Dave did two things - he moved the 6.x-1.12 codebase to a new 6.x-2.x branch and then on the main 6.x-1.x branch reverted all changes since December 31st, 2009. Once that was completed Dave set upon the arduous task of reviewing every commit since that date to identify whether it was worth either re-applying or, at least, reviewing further.

What has lived on is, API-wise, compatible with the 6.x-1.12 code with the exception that the Tokens support is currently only available in the 6.x-2.x branch. Once we decide on the best way of handling it we will be re-adding Token support to v6.x-1.x and then will probably scrap the 6.x-2.x branch entirely.

Almost... there...

Today's release is almost ready for launch, but before we sign off on unleashing a stable release we want to test upgrading existing sites, and this is where you come in. Please help us by testing the new 6.x-1.13-rc1 on backup / development copies of your sites and let us know of your experiences, especially if you had been using one of the previous 6.x-1.12- releases.

Thank you, and I'll see you in the Nodewords issue queue!

Update: v6.x-1.13-rc2 has just been released.

Update: The final v6.x-1.13 has been released.