By fizk on

Forking Open Atrium

This thread is to discuss the benefits/drawbacks of forking Open Atrium in response to the lack of a Drupal 7 port:

#1054326: Port Open Atrium to Drupal 7


If you'd like to see a new Open Atrium-like project, or you're a developer and would like to work on creating a new project, please discuss here.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

basvredeling’s picture

basvredeling
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

I'd prefer a Phase2 supported D7 Open Atrium. Or a model whereby it'd be easier for the community to contribute to OA core.
However, if there is no clear roadmap for OA and there won't be in the foreseeable future. I guess forking will be inevitable.

We've got Atrium running for a number of customers. What we really need is some perspective on the plans of Phase2 to push the project forward.

fizk’s picture

fizk commented

You can read about Phase2's plans for Open Atrium here:

http://opensourcecms.pro/drupal/future-open-atrium/

Q. Drupal 7 is out now and stable. When can we expect a D7-based Open Atrium?

At this point, there are no plans for a Drupal 7 release of Open Atrium in 2011. Because the product is stable and more widely used than any other Drupal distro, we have to be cautious to move forward only when necessary. There is a great deal of development happening on Open Atrium in Drupal 6 still, and we’re excited to see that. Many members of the community are creating features and contributing them back, and we see that as a positive sign that Atrium on D6 is a robust and viable product at this time. As with all of our products, we are considering the best time for a move to D7, and factors that go into that include migration of key community contributed modules to D7, community needs for a D7 product, and the availability and interest of the community to help contribute to such a build.

fizk’s picture

fizk commented

It amazes me that no progress has been made by now.

From what I understand, there has not been any progress for two reasons:

  1. Dependency modules have not been ported to Drupal 7.
  2. Phase2, the developers that took over the project from Development Seed, explicitly do not want to create a Drupal 7 port until "the time is right".

    Q. Drupal 7 is out now and stable. When can we expect a D7-based Open Atrium?

    At this point, there are no plans for a Drupal 7 release of Open Atrium in 2011. Because the product is stable and more widely used than any other Drupal distro, we have to be cautious to move forward only when necessary. There is a great deal of development happening on Open Atrium in Drupal 6 still, and we’re excited to see that. Many members of the community are creating features and contributing them back, and we see that as a positive sign that Atrium on D6 is a robust and viable product at this time. As with all of our products, we are considering the best time for a move to D7, and factors that go into that include migration of key community contributed modules to D7, community needs for a D7 product, and the availability and interest of the community to help contribute to such a build.

In one years time...

In one years time, I would expect that a Drupal 7 port would be released with very basic functionality.

In one years time, I would expect that the Open Atrium developers would work to port the most important dependency modules, like case tracker, to Drupal 7.

In one years time, I would expect many news updates, both in this thread, and on openatrium.com

One year is long enough

I suppose Phase2 expects the entire community to just sit and wait for them to decide when the time is "right".

I'm sorry, but that seems silly to me. Open Atrium is very useful to so many individuals, groups, organizations, and companies.

One year is long enough.

The Future of Open Atrium

If anyone is looking at this and still wants a Drupal 7 version of Open Atrium, I highly recommend taking the initiative to start working on a new Open Atrium-like project.

From a developer perspective, creating a new Open Atrium-like project would help move things along.

From a financial perspective, if you're highly involved in an Open Atrium-like project, you might find a lot of professional consulting opportunities as an expert of that project.

voipfc’s picture

voipfc commented

I don't suppose you've considered it from cost-benefit viewpoint. Drupal 6 was probably the first version of Drupal which was near enough 'Gold' and had a good enough foundation and had good module support. It is good enough for a lot of users now and going to be good enough for them for a couple of years more.

Frankly I think Drupal 7 development diverted resources that should have gone into consolidating the gains made with Drupal 6. I use Drupal 7 and there are very compelling reasons to switch to or upgrade to it. But a business case needs to be made a site by site or a project by project basis.

Open Atrium is a standalone package designed for a specific purpose. Have you identified any shortcomings in the package that can only be fixed by upgrading to Drupal 7?

febbraro’s picture

febbraro commented

Your expectation about what Phase2 does as a company and within the community is not the issue here. If you feel slighted by our lack of movement in Open Atrium, that is your issue alone to bear, we are not running our company to keep you happy, as sad as that might seem to you. We have many things to focus on and many community efforts continually underway. Instead of trying to incite a riot and fork Open Atrium, why don't use your enthusiasm and effort and take it upon yourself to help upgrade Case Tracker to D7? If you are so willing to go work on something that is NOT Open Atrium, why don't you help work on the tool that is already there? If we had venture backing or if Open Atrium made us barrels of cash, we definitely would pay folks full time to develop Open Atrium and, believe me, a Drupal 7 version would exist already. But no rich, dead uncle exists so we still must make money the old fashioned way and meter our community efforts so that we don't go out of business trying to keep others happy.

basvredeling’s picture

basvredeling
Primary language Dutch
Location Amsterdam
commented

I've tried commenting to a blog post on the Phase2 site. See: http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/your-top-question-about-products...
The comments are probably being reviewed before being posted. I'll repost my comment here.

quote from the blogpost:

Finally, and you knew this was coming, community contribution makes a big difference in how often we can release our products. Releases get pushed up on the priority list when community members join us for code sprints, suggest new functionality, and come together to get it built.

I'd like to respond to your remark about community contributions. We're heavy Open Atrium users and many of our clients use OA on a day to day basis. We'd love to contribute (and we do) so I'd like to ask you some questions.

There are a lot of community contributions being made constantly. For example: many community contributions have gone into creating the Drupal 7 core, Views 3, etc. In essence most contrib modules are constantly being updated. Are these currently being implemented in a new Atrium release?

In other words: before asking us (the community) for more contributions I'd like to ask you: How are you implementing the current community efforts?

I understand Phase2 is a service organisation first and foremost. However, if Atrium is to steer clear from forks and becoming outdated, you as a company should take the active lead in pushing the development of OA. It would be very helpful if you could at least post a roadmap. What are your plans for the Open... * distributions? and Could you post a Roadmap?

It's good to hear that Phase2 are perceiving their Drupal distros to be community projects / products. I'm very keen to see Open Atrium becoming even more of a community effort. But that would imply that you shed some light on the technical coordination of the project. The community.openatrium.com site won't cut it if people can only post ideas, documentation and issues. Would you be open to putting the Atrium features, custom modules and the distribution itself on drupal.org to be maintained by the community under your technical lead?

One of the big barriers in easily keeping Atrium up to date is the fact that Atrium is a hacked product. Are there any efforts on your part to de-hack Open Atrium?

febbraro’s picture

febbraro commented

Roadmaps are tricky business. They create timelines that, as a services company contributing to products, you are almost always forced to deviate from when your business demands different things from you. While I think it might be important to set some expectations, having published hard and fast roadmaps has never proved fruitful to us.

The upgrade to D7 issue is always a tricky one. We are always having conversations about it, but there are real issues. Doing a straight functionality port to D7 seems silly just to have it on D7 versus D6. The product should move to a new version when there are things that the product wants to do that D7 will enable that it cannot already do now. An I'm not hearing compelling arguments for functionality, just that folks want it on D7.

I'm not sure how many sites or even modules you have upgraded to D7 from D6, but I can tell you it is one hell of a heavy lift and after doing it a few times we are definitely looking first before we leap. To think about doing this for a product customized as much as Atrium is a huge and costly undertaking that we at Phase2 cannot carry the burden alone (as other seem to suggest we should). What we can promise is to be more open about the direction we think the product should take, and what we can contribute to the effort.

As for moving OpenAtrium moving to drupal.org, we have already begun the process. Litecal and Xref were moved to d.o over 8 months ago. We are currently evaluating some licensing concerns surrounding Atrium Features and Ginko (they are BSD licensed and drupal.org requires GPL) with the hopes of moving everything there to better support the product and the community as you suggest. That said, both projects are public on github and we have integrated community pull requests to those modules. There is nothing stopping contributions to *any* part of Open Atrium at this point.

Another thing to note, Phase2 led a community fundraising effort to pay 3281d Consulting (thanks dww) to implement functionality to move full distro packaging to drupal.org, external libraries and all. See: http://drupal.org/node/779440

Your last point, however, I take issue with. Can you explain to me how Open Atrium is a hacked product? If you are referring to patches, that is a standard practice for providing functionality until it can be integrated into an upstream release. All of those patches are prepresented in the issue queues. Some are even integrated waiting for official releases. To call Open Atrium a hacked product is just incorrect.

I do appreciate all of your questions and taking an entirely different tone than some others in this thread.

Macronomicus’s picture

Macronomicus commented

I think it's unfair to go after phase2 like that, after all they paid for a free app and are maintaining it in its current state; most importantly to the broader community that is using it now. That said, I would wager you could create a similar end product in D7 without too much fuss. The "special sauce" for d6 is not needed in d7.