There was some talk recently about releasing pre-alpha versions of Drupal 7 for development and testing purposes and this got me thinking about the actual Drupal 7 code freeze. For those of you who are "in the cold" and don't know what a code freeze is (horrible pun, sorry), it's a given amount of time where features are denied from going into Drupal. Although it's sad to see additional features not be able to go into Drupal, it gives the developers a bit of time to fix bugs and optimize performance before the official releases go out.

If you have a look at Dries' Drupal 7 Timeline, you see that he predicts a November 15th code freeze if we have full test coverage. Now, if you have a look at the Drupal 7 test coverage report, you can see that we're pretty close! So, assuming that we get the three month code freeze, that means we only have about two months left to get all the features and awesomeness that we so ever want in Drupal 7. What awesomeness is missing from Drupal 7, you ask?

Here are the items remaining on my wish list:

• Standardize static caching
• More flexible JavaScript ordering and an alter operation
• New variable defaults to improve performance and help developers
• Improve command-line capabilities of Drupal
• Revamp drupal_add_css()
• Data API: first steps
• Blocks system refactoring
• Help System - Patch #1
• [Schema API] Install/Uninstall hook_schema automatically
• Refactor page (and node) rendering

Although Drupal 7 has already achieved its awesomeness status, having these items added to its mastery would absolutely blow my mind.