Dries Buytaert

When we first announced the Spark authoring experience initiative for Drupal in May of last year, we chose Drupal 7 as our target in order to develop the features and get them in front of testers as quickly as possible. After DrupalCon Munich in August, the team shifted efforts towards Drupal 8 core instead, in order to more directly improve the experience of Drupal itself. Since then, we have successfully worked with the community to drive home a redesigned and mobile-friendly toolbar, support for draft revisions, in-place editing, numerous mobile improvements, and have WYSIWYG and unified in-place editing on the way.

This has kept the team pretty busy, however, and so the Drupal 7 version of Spark has not been receiving many updates in the meantime. Olivier Friesse (noisetteprod) of Radio France graciously offered to sponsor work to help things along. Thanks to this sponsorship, we were able to have Théodore Biadala (nod_) of Acquia's Professional Services team spend 3 weeks on getting the in-place editing feature production-ready for Drupal 7, including:

• Full backport of Drupal 8 code, including Create.js/VIE.js integration
• Integration with CKEditor module to provide WYSIWYG support for rich text areas, which resulted in numerous upstream improvements
• Removed requirement on jQuery 1.7 so that Edit module can work on stock Drupal 7 installations without jquery_update module
• Removed requirement on PHP 5.3 so Edit module can also work in PHP 5.2 environments
• Basic support for Views/Panels in-place editing
• Numerous bug fixes to help further stabilize the code base

Working towards a stable release for Drupal 7 naturally identified bugs with the Drupal 8 implementation of inline editing, which are being tracked in this issue: https://www.drupal.org/node/1894454.

In short, the needs of Radio France have brought tremendous value for the entire community, in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. If you'd like to try out the work that we've done, download the 7.x-1.0-alpha7 release of Spark or Edit 7.x-1.0-alpha6!

Thanks once again, Olivier and Radio France, for your support! If other companies would like to sponsor further work on Spark, please let me know.