Drupal as a community-driven software development platform

Presenter: Derek Wright (dww)

Drupal.org relies on Drupal to develop Drupal itself. Primarily through the project, project issue tracking and CVS management/tracker modules, along with the support forums, handbook documentation, and so on, Drupal is already a viable platform for a software development community to coordinate and produce high quality software.

However, there is much room for improvement, and lots of active work in this space. Many sites still rely on turn-key solutions such as Trac, which are great for certain things, but not nearly as flexible and powerful as Drupal for others. I've been working heavily on expanding Drupal's capabilities in this regard, to make Drupal truly shine as an alternative platform to host community driven software projects. Integration with Organic Groups offers tremendous potential that I have only started to explore via the OG Project module.

In particular, I'm in the process of migrating the entire University of Wisconsin - Madison Computer Science Department's Condor Project to use Drupal as the way it handles contributions from users and developers all over the world, coordinates the development efforts of the nearly 50 staff and students who work on the project, and to manage releases, documentation and the support infrastructure. Unlike Drupal itself, Condor is all written in C/C++, so we also have to deal with nightly builds + tests on about 20 different platforms. I'll therefore be working on a Drupal module to integrate our automated build/test system with the Drupal site.

This session was a place to find out what I've been doing as the maintainer of these modules, what my plans are for the future, and to discuss the future of Drupal as THE website platform for community-driven software projects. To begin, I passed out a handout describing the current state of things and my view on the limitations of Drupal in these areas. Basically, it was my giant wish-list of things I'd like to improve given the time and resources.

I hope to post a summary of the discussion as well... stay tuned for updates.