[META] Panels 3.4 Release

Yes! It is in the plans. As you may have noticed, I've been cleaning up and committing a bunch of the RTBC issues outstanding. As soon as we get some patches in for ctools, I'm hoping to get a release out for both modules.

Thanks @japerry cleaning up the issue queue is a lot of work! There are 4 pages of open D7 issues. It's great that there was a dev release earlier this week, but modules as popular and active as Panels really shouldn't have more than a year to put out a stable release.

Maintenance is a great deal of work (as you know). I do think we can do more within d.o to provide some more incentives for people to contribute more back to great modules like this.

I do think that there should be incentives to ensure that people who are contributing to it are recognized. There should be some motivation to go through the issue queue and see that reports that people have made are acknowledged, repeatable, fixable and eventually closed. This is a lot of work, but there should be some acknowledgement done for those who are tending the issue queue, but I don't think that's enough.

I've blogged about the use of Flattr & Gittip. The latter brought up some great discussions about initiatives like Top Shelf Modules and DrupalFund.us.

Adoption of any of those platforms seems to be pretty slow though. Gittip has the greatest acceptance on d.o because there is at least a form on each users Profile page to add it in, and yet, there has been marginal increase in the adoption or donation rates https://www.gittip.com/for/drupal/

I tried to highlight how Gittip could be incorporated into d.o's issue queue in order to provide incentives to individual contributors. From feedback there, I decided to look at how Corporate logos could be incorporated into the issue queues (even for anonymous users).

None of these solutions is without it's problems. Some of these solutions will work better to support some projects than others. I think there are probably hundreds of other ways to help shape participation in the Drupal community such that end users, developers, designers and Drupal shops are able to find easier ways to contribute back. But I think we need to get the conversation moving about how to see that important projects like this get the support that they need to see that they are properly resourced.

There's a place to discuss Drupal.org improvements in GDO but there isn't a lot of active participation there.

Ultimately, what kinds of functionality/UI changes would help make this module better maintained? For folks who are active contributors, what would help you? Each project may have it's own ideas about how to best motivate the community that uses it's code. It might be that folks are confident that there's no need to change anything, and perhaps they are right.

But @japerry - right now what would help you go through this long list & be able to put out a new release?

Hi! Thanks for your comments, and I think this issue isn't a bad one to coordinate the 3.4 release. But while process is relevant, its not at issue here.

I've updated the original post to lay out the panels release battle plan.

I think it'd be great if #2017455: Exported panels won't clear simple cache could get a review, but I don't want to RTBC my own patch.

I'd also like to hear some feedback on #2184143: Add a Panels cache table, adding this would allow us to simplify Panels Hash Cache and Panels Content Cache, plus others.

#1971872: PanelsIPE add pane mutistep forms do not seem to work using ajax Might be a good one to include

Fixed!

Thanks to everyone who helped test and get panels out for release! Going forward we hope to be doing 3 to 4 releases per year.