#336358 by Wesley Tanaka, brianV: fix slow query in ping module and correct its use of the database API

#197730 by keith.smith: standardize on a much more user friendly cron reference in help texts, explain its importance with more examples in INSTALL.txt

#200069 by keith.smith: new standard for 'more information' links in module help texts, as the handbook we referred to before was renamed

#197297 by DanW (as GHOP 17), and keith.smith: clean up lots of help texts, update to drag and drop functionality, drupal.module removal, etc

- Patch #163191 by hswong3i: removed db_num_rows() for compatibility with Oracle and DB2.  Also a performance improvement.

#154064 by pwolanin: get hook_help() up to speed to menu changes, allowing router path based lookups, and also full path argument lookup with a passed argument array

- Patch #146910 by dww: only allow enabling modules with the same Drupal core compatibility version.

 - typo fix in watchdog() phpdoc
 - add a missing array() on a watchdog call in ping.module
 - handle NULL 'variables' value in syslog module

Noticed these while writing the documentation for watchdog() updates and by comitting the updates into the i18n SVN repository.

- Patch #92992 by webchick and neclimdul: clean up documentation that is superseded by the new 'by module' administration dashboard.

- Patch #81740 by merlinofchaos, webchick, moshe, neclimdul et al: added package support to the modules page.

See: http://drupal.org/node/64279#t-placeholders

- Patch 42498 by m3avrck: unified cron-trackers and added a section that lets you figure out whether cron is running (usability improvement).

- Patch #19451 by JonBob: improved consistency of module descriptions.  We should write guidelines for this -- maybe in the PHPDoc code of the _help hook.

  We added a 'severity' column to watchdog():
    watchdog($type, $message, $link) --> watchdog($type, $message, $severity, $link);

    * Specify a severity in case you are reporting a warning or error.
    * The $link-parameter is now the fourth parameter instead of the third.

  TODO: document this in the upgrade guide.

- Made the ping module ping pingomatic.com, which in turn, will ping all the major ping services.
  Less code to ping more services.

- Patch #14005 by Richard: rewrote the ping module's built-in documentation.

- Bugfix: provide an absolute URL to the 'ping servers'.

- Patch by JonBob: for consistency and readability, add brief descriptions of each source file inside the @file comment block at the head of the file. This helps with Doxygen indexing, and also allows neophytes to see what a file does immediately on opening the source, regardless of the organization of the hooks.

- Code improvements by Stefan: made all status messages consistent (and easier to translate).

- Patch #7458: bugfix: reverted the conditional inclusion of xmlrpc.inc.

- Patch #7458 by killes: conditionally include xmlrpc.inc.

Tabs patch!

CHANGES
-------

 + Introduced tabs. First, we extended the menu system to support tabs. Next, a tab was added for every link that was (1) an administrative action other than the implicit 'view' (2) relevant to that particular page only. This is illustrated by the fact that all tabs are verbs and that clicking a page's tab leads you to a subpage of that page.

 + Flattened the administration menu. The tabs helped simplify the navigation menu as I could separate 'actions' from 'navigation'. In addition, I removed the 'administer > configuration'-menu, renamed 'blocks' to 'sidebars' which I hope is a bit more descriptive, and made a couple more changes. Earlier, we already renamed 'taxonomy' to 'categorization' and we move 'statistics' under 'logs'.

 + Grouped settings. All settings have been grouped under 'administer > settings'.

TODO
----

 + Update core themes: only Xtemplate default supports tabs and even those look ugly.  Need help.

 + Update contributed modules.  The menu() hook changed drastically.  Updating your code adhere the new menu() function should be 90% of the work.  Moreover, ensure that your modue's admin links are still valid and that URLs to node get updated to the new scheme ('node/view/x' -> 'node/x').