Welcome to the first in an occasional series of posts about recent happenings in Drupal 7 core.

This is modeled after the Drupal 8 posts that have been going on for a while; you can find all Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 core updates on the Drupal Core Updates page going forward.

Drupal 7.40 released (UPDATE: Drupal 7.41 released also)

Drupal 7.40 was released last week! This is a maintenance release containing bug fixes, performance improvements, and a few new features. Now is a good time to test it out and upgrade your sites. If you discover any problems introduced by this release, report them in the issue queue.

Drupal 7.40 contains no security fixes, but Drupal 7.39 (released in August) does, so make sure your sites are updated to at least that version. Note that there is a security release window coming up today (October 21) also. (Update: Drupal 7.41 was released today, containing a security fix for the core Overlay module.)

New features in Drupal 7 core

Many people have the misconception that Drupal 8 will be the first version of Drupal that allows new features to be added after the initial stable release, but in fact that's been the policy for Drupal 7 since early 2012.

Several features have been added to Drupal 7 since it was released, but awareness is not as high as it could be which is one of the reasons we haven't added more. One goal of this series of posts is to highlight features that have been added recently as well as new ones that are up for consideration. A sample is below.

For site builders

• Want a faster front-end experience for your users? You can prevent Drupal from loading jQuery and other JavaScript files on pages that don't use them (since Drupal 7.36). Currently this can be enabled via a variable (e.g. in settings.php) but there's an issue to consider adding a user interface for it. Make sure to read the caveats before turning this feature on.
• Don't like incomprehensible machine names such as "hero_large_retina_1325x505"? Drupal supports human-readable labels on image styles (since Drupal 7.23), so you can now use capital letters, spaces, parentheses and anything else you want when naming image styles.
• The Statistics module can now record hits to your content via client-side JavaScript (since Drupal 7.25), which allows cached page views that weren't even served by the Drupal site to still be accurately counted. Make sure to read the caveats before enabling this, though, especially if you have a high traffic site.

For developers

• Want a convenient theme debugging tool? There's one built into Drupal core (since Drupal 7.33). Just add the indicated line to the settings.php file in your local testing environment (or, since Drupal 7.40, uncomment the line that's already in the default settings.php file) and debug away.
• Do you like PHP traits? You can now easily use them because the Drupal 7 autoloader supports them (since Drupal 7.40). Just be aware that they are a PHP 5.4 feature, so if your module relies on them then sites running on earlier versions of PHP won't be able to use your module.
• When specifying dependencies in your module's .info file, you now can (and are encouraged to) specify the project that your module depends on also (since Drupal 7.40) - for example, dependencies[] = views:views_ui to declare a dependency on the Views UI module within the Views project, rather than just dependencies[] = views_ui. This extra information will help resolve ambiguities and can potentially be used by other tools in the future, for example by the drupal.org testbot or Drush to be able to automatically download dependencies that currently can't be downloaded automatically.

If you have ideas for other new Drupal 7 features you'd like to work on, get started in the issue queue (but keep in mind that they still must be subject to the backwards-compatibility policy).

Proposed Drupal 7 changes that need your feedback

Here are some possible Drupal 7 changes on the horizon that need feedback from Drupal 7 site builders or developers to make sure we don't cause problems for existing sites and existing code (and some of them need developers to work on the patches also):

• We'd like to add an "administer fields" permission to core which would be required to use the field UI (in addition to whatever permission is required by each entity type the fields are attached to). This should benefit site builders and allow for more secure permission setups, but it could have a minor impact on existing sites and a moderate impact on contributed module automated tests; see the linked issue for details.
• Should we turn on page caching and CSS/JavaScript aggregation in the Standard install profile in Drupal 7 (similar to what Drupal 8 did)? See the linked issue for details and to provide your feedback.
• How about simplifying the Modules page, in particular to hide the less-useful dependency information by default? This could potentially be a big user-experience win for Drupal 7 sites. Discussion (and potentially patches) are needed on the linked issue.
• Would your Drupal 7 sites be impacted if we added a default clickjacking defense to Drupal 7 core? This is a security improvement which would involve preventing Drupal 7 sites from being shown inside an iframe on a site with a different domain. For sites that need to be shown inside such an iframe, the protection could be turned off, but we need to make sure we get this right before adding it to core.
• We'd like to allow the "Limit allowed HTML tags" filter to also restrict HTML attributes in Drupal 7, to make Drupal's text filtering options a bit more flexible. Help in particular is needed with backporting the Drupal 8 patch on that issue.

Please leave constructive feedback on any these topics in the individual issues linked above.

Proposed new release schedule for Drupal 7

We're considering adopting a similar release schedule for Drupal 7 that Drupal 8 will be using (i.e., a 6-month feature release schedule, with pseudo-semantic versioning). See the linked issue for details and to participate in the discussion.

And that's a wrap

Thanks for reading; hopefully you found this post useful!

If you'd like to see more of these posts in the future (or if you'd like to help write them) or if you have any general feedback, feel free to leave your feedback in the comments. But if you have feedback on specific issues mentioned above, please leave it on the relevant issue instead. Thank you.