I know that when I talk to people about considering developing Drupal sites, I tell them that there is a bunch of time that you need to
spend researching the best way to get something done. For some
programmers "research" means going to an online reference with lists of
function syntax. But with Drupal you have to add to that: reading issue
queues, support requests, forum posts etc. (and writing to all those as
well) to <span style="font-style: italic;">evaluate</span> what the best direction is for a particular solution. <br>
<br>The benefits of this process are great. You end up meeting great
people and leveraging a huge amount of work created by others. But it
does take an investment of time.<br><br>As many have noted, d.o. can add all kinds of tools (the newly launched "recommended
version" feature being just one -- go Derek!!!) to make this process
easier and faster. And that <span style="font-weight: bold;">will</span> happen. I particularly like Florian's suggestion about free-tagging on the module pages.<br>
<br>But being a good Drupal developer <span style="font-style: italic;">requires evaluation and analysis</span> of a lot of moving parts: <br><ul><li>feature set, </li><li>code maturity/quality, </li><li>development activity, </li>
<li>responsiveness of maintainer(s), </li><li>dependence on other modules</li></ul><br>These
are the "moving parts." As daunting as it might seem to engage in such
research, it does get easier, even as the number of modules grows. One begins to "know"
modules and families of modules like you know friends (who is engaged to whom etc. :) <br>
<br>I think part of the "problem" might be folks' expectation that
things "should" be easier. I'm certainly for making things easier, but
not at the expense of making the barrier to entry for module developers higher. I think it is
a low barrier to entry that has contributed to harnessing a huge amount
of energy. Overall, the quality and quantity of contributed code to
Drupal is impressive.<br>
<br>Shai<br><a href="http://content2zero.com">content2zero</a><br>