Dries Buytaert wrote:
This is somewhat problematic as we need more people that are good Drupal developers. There is such a
We recently got some very nice additions to our developer crowd.
At any point in time, we had a nice addition of developers. That doesn't mean there is enough talent available.
What qualifies as "enough"? Drupal is a growing project and sure we could need more Drupal coders. But it isn't that we wouldn't get new code. You already added a couple new features to HEAD and 4.7 is only two weeks old. There are a lot of patches flying around and soon I will have to get extra patches for 4.7 because the code changed so much.
strong demand for good Drupal developers, yet which each new version, we add more barriers as a side effect of making Drupal more powerful.
I think this is only a matter of perception. You (as I was) aren't yet fully comfy with the new forms API and thus think that everybody will find it more difficult. For people who are new to it, they will just read the (excellent!) docs and should be able to make the usual forms within a few minutes.
It's not just a matter of perception. At least a dozen people told me they got flabbergasted by the new forms API.
Oh, I was too. Because I was used to the old ways. It took some time - and the process isn't finished - to get used to the new ways. I am quite sure that 2/3 of your dozen people were people who were used to the old string based functions and had not really investigated the new forms. Of course, I am not yet 100% confortable with it, but I was always a slow learner. ;)
The web is built by millions of individuals, many of which are amateurs. They continuously update, tweak and rebuild their websites. We want Drupal to remain accessible for them.
Do we? I certainly want them to be able to use Drupal but I'd appreciate if they'd keep their hands out of the code if they aren't programmers. This only makes for nasty support cases.
Funny. You just mentioned you didn't know any PHP or MySQL when you started using Drupal ...
Right. I first had tried to build a web site builder in bash and AWK and found it didn't work too well. Then I looked for CMSes in FORTRAN. Didn't find any and resorted to learn another programming language. But I wouldn't say that I didn't have any programming experience. Cheers, Gerhard