As an intermediate Drupal user and beginner developer, I thought my opinion might be worth something, if only to prevent demoralization of developments that have been a great help to the community, and give a different "user" perspective.

As a developer who needs WYSIWYG editor features for current projects, but who absolutely depends on "4.7 classic" TinyMCE features, like being able to set the default settings to off, and turn on the WYSIWYG editor when I want to, but on the other hand allowing other roles to have it on all the time, I must say that the 5.1 changes blew me away. It should have been a branch.

Of course I immediately downloaded the "4.7 classic" patch, but... I felt very uncomfortable using patches in real world projects (painted into a corner on automated updates, etc.).

I understood the delay, particularly if there was a problem with flooding and global warming, and even if it was a problem of Drupal-id being chronically open source community autistic and unwilling to be aware of his/her impact on the community. I agreed that nothing should be done hastily. I had confidence (and still do) that the Drupal community will eventually handle this intelligently, and that after a couple of months it will be resolved (still think that).

The start of the Moxie project was a godsend, I want people to understand that: it allowed for a proper project to be used, more official, more secure than the previous patch. And it provided a solution satisfying a dire need while we all be patient with whatever it was that was going on behind the scenes. With Moxie, I could say: well, at least I have a dependable solution, it's official, it's secure. Creating Moxie was a great move: scores of people have real projects to maintain, today.

Now, I am confident that common sense and plain old refactoring will solve things, now that all the info is available and the rules of the game are crystal clear:

There should only be a single TinyMCE project
5.x.1 should be what Moxie is now, and place redirect info on Moxie project for a period of time so people don't get confused. Now.
A simple "if you want roles and WYSIWYG toggle features, download 5.x.1 " to as a guide to the perplexed.
5.x.2 should be the fork (for that is what it is), totally allowable. TinyMCEplus should be forcibly discontinued. A single sentence on the project page explaining the features of the fork "No need to screw around with roles and toggles, just plug in and play... great!".
But no fork with another project name. Imagine if someone wanted to do a fork of Views, and we have a ViewsMinus, then another person wants to do a fork of Tagadelic, but without the cloud, and call it TagadelicPlus. Ridiculous. Make all the branches you want, as long as you document it clearly; and if you don't someone else should.
5.x.3 should be for anyone with any other bright ideas.
The Drupal leadership should intervene NOW to do this. Let's face it, like all open source projects, this is a meritocracy, not a "democracy", although it is guided by democratic principles (to a fault I would say). It certainly cannot be a free-for-all, and from what I see never has been. But this act needs to be cleaned up as soon as possible. It seems to be atypical.
Up till now, good people have spent a lot of their valuable time doing a very reasonable job trying to provide what is needed and taken a series of steps to do so. It's all been good. But now, we have all the info we need, and the rules seem clear. I say the Drupal core development team should act swiftly now and enforce the already created consensus on allowing different feature paths on different branches on a single project.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar
(updating to 5.x as soon as there is an upgrade path for project/project issue, of which I make heavy use. I understand dww is on holiday, bless him! We must help him when he gets back)

On 2/15/07, Allie Micka <allie@pajunas.com> wrote:

On Feb 15, 2007, at 1:23 PM, Boris Mann wrote:

I've explained "the plan" several times now:
* Kevin R "head" maintainer -- currently working on 5.x-2
* Allie + Steve on 4.7 evolution path on 5.x-1
* convergence and free ponies for everyone in some future tag

I think it's going to be confusing and problematic to manage the issue queue and overall development on two discrete branches of the same project. Since TinyMCE plus is already in motion, it would probably be better to move the 5.x-2 stuff there. That's all I'm going to say on that one though, and I'll go with whatever flow flows.

I'll lend a hand where I can, but I have to reiterate that all this vitriol and melodrama is a great big giant turn-off that makes me feel disinclined to do much more than I have already done.

Thanks though Boris, for keeping this moving along.

Allie Micka
pajunas interactive, inc.
http://www.pajunas.com

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