On 2/23/06, Jeff Eaton <jeff@viapositiva.net> wrote:
This is a potential problem for places like Bryght, but I don't see Google really competing with mambo/joomla/xoops/drupal/phpnuke.
There are plenty of shops out there doing well with their own homebrew CMS system with a fraction of drupal's deployments and feature. The issue isn't technology, it's service and support. Technology doesn't have value, solutions do. On that note, I want to rant about Drupal a bit. Drupal has a very impressive amount of geek brain power behind it. The node system, the hook system, the module system, the new FAPI, all of that stuff is extremely clever. Very smart stuff. However, featurewise, that stuff is really only important to developers. I think there needs to be more focus on solving real problems. Featurewise, this is what I'm missing in Drupal core: 1. Pluggable authentication support. I'm talking about a user.module that uses LDAP, or Kerberos, or whatever for authentication, and doesn't need to maintain an external user record. 2. i18n and l10n support in core. Just started looking into this, and just started looking at Jose Reyero's i18n module. Apparently doesn't need to patch against core anymore, but need to investigate more. This is what I think is needed for the project: These are obversations from reading through the dev list. This is mostly addressing my confusion of where responsibilities lie. 1. Better deligation of responsibilities. - A core team: Handles core development, approves user contributed patches, etc. - A security team: maintains old releases and back ports bug fixes, not functionality. - A release team: handles release timelines, documentation, and all the responsibility of making the latest version of drupal ready for public consumption. - A contributions team: provides support for contributors. Maintains the contributions list, isn't there a better way than one _long_ list of modules? Does the buck stops at Dries on the direction and organization of Drupal development? It seems to me that Drupal has gained enough traction and popularity that a development, maintenance and support model needs to be decided on. Some off the top of my head: The FreeBSD model - I outlined it above. The OpenBSD model - One supreme dictator, lots of hackers. (i think) The Linux model - Here's a core, everything else is up to you. Drupal is like a distribution now, I dunno if this model would work. The Commercial Model: probably wouldn't work. Ben.