GitLab

- Patch #18252 by tostinni: don't try creating the picture directory when picture support is not enabled.

  Usernames can now be themed; eg. an icon/avatar could be added.

  TODO: update contributed modules + update the migration docs.

  Generally improves readability; gets rid of technical jargon; provides
  concrete example; provides suggestions for how permissions can be used.

  TODO: document the defaults in the PHPdoc comments.

- Patch #21566 by deekayan: fixed user_access() function returning a string and not a boolean.  Also improves performance of user_access().

- Patch #24135 by Moshe: made it possible to ban visitors based on hostname/IP.  Banning visitors can either be done from the 'access control' pages, or directly from the statistics pages.  This feature is very convenient to block badly behaving crawlers.

Return of the JavaScript!

- #22519: form_autocomplete(): Ajax based autocompletion. Currently used for user names and folksonomy tags.

- Added the ability to track page generation times in the statistics module.
  (Made some improvements as per the suggestions in the issue.)

- Added extended timer implementation.

  keep track of the user's last access. In turn, this allowed me to:

  1. Optimize the "Who's online" block.  On drupal.org, the "Who's online"
     block requires 32 SQL queries.  With this patch, only 2 queries are
     left (eliminated 30 SQL queries), and one of the two remaining queries
     became appr. 20 times faster.

  2. Correct the "Last access" column in the user administration overview
     table.  The presented data was not accurate, which led to the column
     being removed.  You can now sort users by 'last access'.