[development] Very concerned over Drupal's core development

[Steven Peck]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Matt Farina <matt at mattfarina.com> wrote:
> Two thoughts occurred to me on the community.
>
> First, we are no longer what the community was 3 or 5 years ago. The front
> page of drupal has changed with a changing focus and need. Instead of a few
> thousand users there are hundreds of thousands of users. The front page of
> d.o has a different place in the ecosystem than it used to. But, we still
> need a place for some of those things that used to get posted. Is g.d.o the
> place for that?

It is and I find it disturbing that it changed the way it did but it
happened.  I haven't decided what, if anything, I want to do about it.

> Second, we seem to have a bit of an identity crisis. Is drupal a framework
> or a CMS? If it's both should they be cleanly separated? How does this and
> should this work? Moving the CMS like features into contrib, as some have
> suggested, seems to be centered around this. If we have a drupal framework
> and a drupal cms do we have maintainers for each piece? How does this
> interaction work?

I disagree with the identity crisis.  Drupal has always been in
balance.  This balance is extremely beneficial and because it is
'close enough' for many it gets used, but it is also 'not quite right'
for others and leads them into contributing or learning development.
Some persist, some give up, some get angry and some do notable things.
 Drupal has been like this every release I have seen.  If it hadn't
been usable as a CMS (4.3), I would never have used it past learning
how to install it.

As long as the edge cases (toss everything out of core now vs just
make it build my site telepathically) don't get their way we've
probably kept a nice middle ground.  As I am one of the few people on
the dev list in the 'want some CMS features' camp, I feel it is
important for me to speak up when the 'toss everything out' camp puts
up their list.

It's just the way discussions work is all.

> Ah, growing pains. Now we just have to figure out how to bribe the kids to
> clean their rooms (i.e. review patches and clean the queue).

See historical emails for those discussions :)

Steven


> On Apr 21, 2009, at 3:31 AM, Stefan Nagtegaal wrote:
>
>>
>> Op 21 apr 2009, om 08:20 heeft Steven Peck het volgende geschreven:
>>
>>> <snip></snip>
>>>
>>> And Stefan, I too miss the old front page where it wasn't all site
>>> implementations and Drupalcons but things people found interesting,
>>> but that's just what happened.
>>>
>>> -sepeck
>>
>> Happy to hear that Sepeck, sometimes I wonder if it is just me who is
>> experiencing this.
>> Drupal is not for users anymore, drupal is for making money and profit.
>> One example is the "Support the Drupal redesign! Donate Now"-button, which
>> is currently cycling over the frontpage. Why can't we - as a community -
>> build the new drupal.org design? It gives us a good reality check why drupal
>> is (too) hard for true designers.
>>
>> That said, you could wonder that if some module is moved from core to
>> contrib and dies silently, if it wasn't in core too long already.
>> If nobody feels the urge to keep a certain module up to date, then you
>> could argue about its usefullnes.
>>
>> I would rather see modules like views(1|2|3).module in core, which are
>> very well designed and maintained and deserves to be in core, because of
>> it's quality and filling the gap which there currently is in core. Building
>> views/page-layouts is something drupal needs. Although, I do not think that
>> the current implementation is right, the functionality surely is.
>>
>> Getting rid of modules like the help.module is not that smart imo. Dries
>> started a monster project to make drupal more accessible and easier to use
>> by attracting Mark Boulton and Leisa, which I think is a good thing.
>> Although, I do not doubt that they could make things easier to use, but I'm
>> pretty convinced they could not make things as easy that the help texts are
>> becoming redundant.
>>
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>>
>> Stefan
>
>