pre-session discussion
Last modified: February 2, 2006 - 06:32
i'm hoping to get a little discussion going here prior to the actual session. see here for a summary what the current outlook/goals for the session are.
i'm looking for ideas on what specifically we might want to cover in this discussion. What are our roadblocks to making big changes in drupal happen more easily?
Here's some initial things i think would be great to address:
- The patch queue -- Woefully underpowered for bigger projects. What are our alternatives?
- Test sites -- Bigger changes might greatly benefit from having a test site set up. It should lead to more testing as it eliminates the barrier of creating the test environment. Can we put a system in place for this?
- Encouraging small group development -- one person writing a 100K patch is simply inefficient. What systems can we put into place that will not just offer the tools for small group development, but actually encourage it??
Please throw in your ideas/comments, and I'll try to form a coordinated session plan out of it all... :)
Patch queue
Hey Chad,
I think one of the big outcomes of the entire conference should be some consensus about where the patch queue (project module) is going. That said, both Dries and I plan on dwelling on the topic to lesser or greater degrees in our sessions.
If you've got ideas to throw out, and are set to push for some consensus building and planning for the patch queue, then I'd be happy to defer that part of my session to yours. We probably shouldn't rehash the same issues twice, though.
Here's what I want us to consider, in a nutshell:
Lol. I'll stop here. The short version is: Nobody has any motivation to work on the project module because they don't use it themselves, and they don't feel empowered to make the type of decision that would influence the way Drupal.org works.
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
Impressions and introduction
I am quite new to Drupal, a few months, and have been doing various things with it for a company that I am sub-contracting for. northStudio.com is a small Victoria based web development office that also has a full time school teaching same. I have been tasked with taking the programming department in a new direction. After a decent amount of research, Drupal surfaced over several other CMS systems as the one to be used. Small codebase, interoperability of content, great community support and very active development were all factors in the decision. It will be used for clients sites that require dynamic sections, and internally in the company as well. Other OS systems will also be used for specific needs where Drupal is less developed, but the majority of clients are satisfied with what Drupal can do for them so quickly.
One of the things that I also implemented with limited satisfaction is dotProject, for internal use by the company to try and keep a handle on the work and steps to complete a project. I can't remember how long I spent looking at open source systems for such tracking, every single one of them out there has failings that either made it annoying to use, or it didn't have detail in the areas needed. dotProject felt like voting someone into office, pick the least evil candidate... I don't mean to slam dotProject, it is an amazing effort that has quite a following as well. I would love to contribute to make it better, but one can only be fractured so many times before becoming ineffectual in all things.
I have estimated pessimistically about one year to develop a system of project management, intake, development, design, and deployment for northStudio. From what I see of Drupal, the potential for a really good extensible project management system is huge. Drupal could end up being a major choice for companies looking for similar solutions. I am stoked about the chance to help bring this about.
Great post Robert, very well put. I vote as well for moving towards a general project management module. Perhaps we can highlight the key limitations failing the module that make it specific to Drupal and come up with some road maps to move it forward. So count me in on that team in whatever manner I suit best.
I look forward to meeting you all and having a great time!
Gord Christmas
Robert failed to point out
Robert failed to point out that project module has in fact received a lot of recent attention and a serious amount of work. It's not currently in use becuase Drupal.org will need an upgrade to 4.7 to use it. You can see it here: http://scratch.drupal.org/project/Modules
Now, there is perdiodically discussion on this and if this time it results in action this time then all to the better.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Thanks for highlighting that.
I alluded to the fact (CivicSpace, Nedjo, Dries etc.), but didn't state it specifically. I wasn't intending to belittle the current efforts (which were launched shortly after the Amsterdam meetings).
Whether the current work will do anything to address the general issues of why the project module doesn't get used by others, doesn't scratch any general itch, and doesn't get worked on without direct involvement from Dries* is another question.
Ideally we'd have a tool that was generic enough for widespread use that can be configured to do the job it needs to do for Drupal.org. That way, development would proceed organically from all of the people who both have a vested interest and a sense of empowerment to make changes.
I'm really looking forward to hearing from Dries and Kieran on this... I know that the issue has generated a lot of brainstorming.
- Robert Douglass
* not that direct involvement from Dries is in any way bad... it would just be nice if people would start submitting patches for fixes and features that he could sit back and review, instead of having to prod and lead people in order to affect change. The whole goal is making the process more efficient for Dries and other developers!
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
It's all good. It's just
It's all good. It's just that all current development on it is narrowly focused and not publisized outside of the hard core development channels, so I thought it important to mention that work had/has been done.
Making it more flexible and generic would posibly be a good thing, etc.....
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
tricky choices
hm. i was hoping the focus of this session would be to specifically address systems which would aid the larger development efforts going on in the drupal community. that being said, it seems difficult to do that without discussing the direction of project module, at least a little :)
recent discussions on the dev list have given me the impression that a major redesign of the project module probably isn't going to happen anytime in the near future. if that is in fact the case, then i'm hesitant to spend a large portion of the session discussing it, as i think that by augmenting the existing module a bit, we can offer some much improved systems for the larger projects. the reason i'd like to focus on that approach specifically is because i believe that it's the larger coding efforts that are suffering the most with our current structure.
so my preference would be to stay focused on the specific needs of large projects, come up with some solutions/action plans, and then implement them into whatever form the project module decides to take. thoughts?
That makes sense
I just didn't want to end up covering the same ground twice =)
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress