On 23 Nov 2005, at 15:20, John VanDyk wrote:
Liza makes some good points, and we should be mature enough to recognize the points she makes and ignore her offensive style instead of lashing back, which accomplishes nothing. Yes, Drupal has a marketing problem. Yes, most of us don't care about that and feel that if she thinks Drupal has a marketing problem she should start marketing Drupal and get involved with decision making, and maybe roll her own easy-to-use distribution (maybe pathauto will even be on by default!). Or maybe she could fund implementation of session remembrance.
I agree that Liza made some good points, as well as bad points. Liza has high expectations of Drupal (a good thing), and it shows. Fortunately, we're well aware of most points. If she did her research, she would have known, and she would not have to offend the many contributors that donate time, money and resources trying to advance Drupal. Either way, let's focus on constructive action points as how to overcome some of Liza's concerns, and see if someone steps forward to take on the work it takes. Let's define a number of manageable tasks that could be implemented ...
She is also right that 4.7 is going to be a lot of work for a lot of people without a lot of tangible benefit and we should recognize that (I know I do). I don't have a problem with that if we are steadily working towards best practices in everything. 4.7 is an example of best practices with forms, since they are now (more) secure.
Whether 4.7 will have tangible benefit depends on your situation. Fact is that 4.7 comes with many improvements that are visible to the user; better templating, free-tagging, contact forms, better search, better syndication, and usability improvements all over the map. At the same time, there are many improvements that are less visible to the user, but that are essential to advance Drupal's technical capabilities; the new forms API and the improved node revisions being prominent examples. Changes like this will help advance the many contributed modules to become simpler and/or more feature-rich. For example, the forms API will help flexinode/CCK, the improved node revisions will help the wiki module(s). It is what it takes, and unfortunately, it can be disruptive. As both you point, the challenge is to get Drupal 4.7 out, to update the contributed projects, and to simplify the migration process for those who want to upgrade to Drupal 4.7. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/