Can cash for views/cck help speed Drupal 6 adoption?
I'd like to get some feedback. Allow me to throw some statements out there and tell me if they are accurate: 1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind. 2) Many people will not even think about moving to Drupal 6 until these modules are upgraded to work with Drupal 6. 3) Therefore, Drupal 6 adoption rate will be slow. If 3 is true, a worrisome development, I make the following arguments (again, tell me if it's wrong): 4) CCK and Views module conversion is slow because they are complex modules done in people's spare time. 5) Paying experienced drupal coders to work on these project will speed development of these modules. If 5 is true, then I ask whether or not this is accurate: 6) Firms that build websites using Drupal have an interest in rolling out newer and better versions of Drupal so they remain competitive. 7) These firms have cash to pay experienced Drupal coders. 8) It would be wise to have these firms pool money together to help speed the development of Views and CCK. I'm sure these kinds of topics have come up before. I'm sorry I can't follow Drupal devel as closely as I would like. If someone could point out the weak/strong points of these arguments/statements, I'd be very interested to hear since I'd like to donate if it will help. Thanks. -- Prometheus Labor Communications, Inc. http://prometheuslabor.com 413-572-1300 Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://communicateordie.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Steve Dondley schrieb:
I'd like to get some feedback. Allow me to throw some statements out there and tell me if they are accurate:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
I've installed CCK on the D6 RC, found a bug which Yves fixed and it appears to be working fine. I am not up to date on views, but I think progress is being made.
2) Many people will not even think about moving to Drupal 6 until these modules are upgraded to work with Drupal 6. 3) Therefore, Drupal 6 adoption rate will be slow.
If 3 is true, a worrisome development, I make the following arguments (again, tell me if it's wrong):
Considering that 1) is at least partially false, I think I don't need to continue. :) Cheers, Gerhard -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHmeTSfg6TFvELooQRAkm1AJ47FmX/uB10QSdWLPVHcxKuiG3axACfaux8 7Rv6Xp3ajxVcOja7hVFGpIc= =lejB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Jan 25, 2008 11:32 AM, Gerhard Killesreiter <gerhard@killesreiter.de> wrote:
Steve Dondley schrieb:
I'd like to get some feedback. Allow me to throw some statements out there and tell me if they are accurate:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
I've installed CCK on the D6 RC, found a bug which Yves fixed and it appears to be working fine.
Agreed. I'm running it on a site. Works fine for me so far. I'm sure there are bugs, but it's not unusable.
I am not up to date on views, but I think progress is being made.
AFAIK this is also correct that progress is being made.
2) Many people will not even think about moving to Drupal 6 until these modules are upgraded to work with Drupal 6. 3) Therefore, Drupal 6 adoption rate will be slow.
If 3 is true, a worrisome development, I make the following arguments (again, tell me if it's wrong):
Considering that 1) is at least partially false, I think I don't need to continue. :)
I debated about replying earlier and saying the opposite: pooling resources (and possibly creating bounties) will likely help speed things up. I think providing testing, UI advice (views is at this stage now), and code (both) is more valuable than money in this case. There have been please for help - interested people should visit the issue queues of the respective projects to see where they can help. If people would rather throw money at the problem than resources, I guess someone should follow up who is interested and long on time and short on money to help fulfill that need ;) Regards, Greg -- Greg Knaddison Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg
I think the issue is a bit more complicated than just offering money (which might help but is not the entire solution). The main problem is that the best people to help with Views 2 right now, which is the phase of basic development and where a good understanding of views is required, are people already very experienced with Views 1, which probably means that they are already involved with Views 2. I am trying to understand the code and help but realise that even developers have little time to explain to newcomers what is going on - so there is a weird relationship where a useful but complex module like Views has many people depending on it and wanting to help but it is hard to do so because it is hard to be effective at the early stages of development. No point me installing Views 2 now, finding a bug, not really understanding what exactly is going on and wasting the developers time by reporting it when the whole codebase is in flux. Best to just let them reach a semi-stable release that can benefit from debugging, documentation, etc (which is what newbies could be most useful at). Perhaps the most effective thing right now would be to make it as easy as possible for merlinofchaos and the other Views experts to focus on Views 2 by relieving them of other more easy and less demanding tasks - but for a geographically distributed group of people with different organizational commitments that is not easy either. I hope that once a more stable version comes out I will be able to help by going through the code and commenting things and producing appropriate documentation and making it easier for more people to get involved with Views 3 at the early stages. In the meantime if anyone does have a good idea of how I could be useful - I have a few hours a day I could dedicate to Views 2 or CCK so just let me know - while I can code quite well my first Drupal installation was 7 weeks ago ( www.lovesicily.com ) and while the Pro Drupal Development book is already wearing thin I guess I am not a Drupal expert yet. Best, Ronald On Jan 25, 2008, at 4:18 PM, Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:
On Jan 25, 2008 11:32 AM, Gerhard Killesreiter <gerhard@killesreiter.de> wrote:
Steve Dondley schrieb:
I'd like to get some feedback. Allow me to throw some statements out there and tell me if they are accurate:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
I've installed CCK on the D6 RC, found a bug which Yves fixed and it appears to be working fine.
Agreed. I'm running it on a site. Works fine for me so far. I'm sure there are bugs, but it's not unusable.
I am not up to date on views, but I think progress is being made.
AFAIK this is also correct that progress is being made.
2) Many people will not even think about moving to Drupal 6 until these modules are upgraded to work with Drupal 6. 3) Therefore, Drupal 6 adoption rate will be slow.
If 3 is true, a worrisome development, I make the following arguments (again, tell me if it's wrong):
Considering that 1) is at least partially false, I think I don't need to continue. :)
I debated about replying earlier and saying the opposite: pooling resources (and possibly creating bounties) will likely help speed things up. I think providing testing, UI advice (views is at this stage now), and code (both) is more valuable than money in this case. There have been please for help - interested people should visit the issue queues of the respective projects to see where they can help.
If people would rather throw money at the problem than resources, I guess someone should follow up who is interested and long on time and short on money to help fulfill that need ;)
Regards, Greg
-- Greg Knaddison Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg
Steve Dondley wrote:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
Depends what you mean by behind. I had a commitment to Panels before I had a commitment to Views 2, and it's not feasible to work seriously on both simultaneously. Once Panels 2 hit beta, Views 2 work started picking back up. That was less than a month ago.
4) CCK and Views module conversion is slow because they are complex modules done in people's spare time.
I spend a lot of sponsored time on Views 2. CCK is more spare time, but there is a bigger group working on CCK and they had a 4 month head start on me.
5) Paying experienced drupal coders to work on these project will speed development of these modules.
The main problem I see is getting developers up to speed. It requires my resources to teach people what I want them to do. That said, I can still use the help of a couple of really good devs, but I don't have time for devs who aren't already very familiar with Views. And I can count on my hands the number of devs I've spoken to who qualify, and I can count on my head the number of those devs who have time to commit to it (and that's with or without a monetary incentive).
6) Firms that build websites using Drupal have an interest in rolling out newer and better versions of Drupal so they remain competitive. 7) These firms have cash to pay experienced Drupal coders. 8) It would be wise to have these firms pool money together to help speed the development of Views and CCK.
PingVision offered, but I think they were expecting me to be more proactive about assembling resources. Unfortunately, one thing I am not is a good project manager -- I find it distracting and difficult to try to manage developers when what I really want to do is have my head deep in code, coming up with solutions.
Here's my take on the situation. There isn't very much really good in-depth writing about Views from the smart developer's standpoint. I'm not talking about how to do Views integration with your module, which is pretty well understood. There's a little more out there for CCK, and that might be one of the reasons more people feel equipped to develop CCK. CCK has already been around longer, and was the result of much more collaboration from the onset. These are just historical observations. Where money might really make a difference in the long run would be to hire someone smart to really dive into Views 2 and write about how it works. The whole Views developer ecosystem is focused on "providing views integration with X" and lots of people can now do this. It's a different matter altogether, though, when it comes to understanding how it works in the back end. -Robert Earl Miles wrote:
Steve Dondley wrote:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
Depends what you mean by behind. I had a commitment to Panels before I had a commitment to Views 2, and it's not feasible to work seriously on both simultaneously. Once Panels 2 hit beta, Views 2 work started picking back up. That was less than a month ago.
4) CCK and Views module conversion is slow because they are complex modules done in people's spare time.
I spend a lot of sponsored time on Views 2. CCK is more spare time, but there is a bigger group working on CCK and they had a 4 month head start on me.
5) Paying experienced drupal coders to work on these project will speed development of these modules.
The main problem I see is getting developers up to speed. It requires my resources to teach people what I want them to do. That said, I can still use the help of a couple of really good devs, but I don't have time for devs who aren't already very familiar with Views. And I can count on my hands the number of devs I've spoken to who qualify, and I can count on my head the number of those devs who have time to commit to it (and that's with or without a monetary incentive).
6) Firms that build websites using Drupal have an interest in rolling out newer and better versions of Drupal so they remain competitive. 7) These firms have cash to pay experienced Drupal coders. 8) It would be wise to have these firms pool money together to help speed the development of Views and CCK.
PingVision offered, but I think they were expecting me to be more proactive about assembling resources. Unfortunately, one thing I am not is a good project manager -- I find it distracting and difficult to try to manage developers when what I really want to do is have my head deep in code, coming up with solutions.
Robert Douglass wrote:
Here's my take on the situation. There isn't very much really good in-depth writing about Views from the smart developer's standpoint. I'm not talking about how to do Views integration with your module, which is pretty well understood. There's a little more out there for CCK, and that might be one of the reasons more people feel equipped to develop CCK. CCK has already been around longer, and was the result of much more collaboration from the onset. These are just historical observations.
Where money might really make a difference in the long run would be to hire someone smart to really dive into Views 2 and write about how it works. The whole Views developer ecosystem is focused on "providing views integration with X" and lots of people can now do this. It's a different matter altogether, though, when it comes to understanding how it works in the back end.
This is absolutely correct. So this would be a good place to put some resources. I've tried to do a better job of in-code documentation in Views 2, but the one thing that's lacking is an overall architecture doc, and I haven't quite figured out the best way to put this together. I have an offer of help there, but that offer is contingent this person having mythical time.
Yes, this struck me as the right answer, too. So, the next question is, what kind of budget would we be looking at? Once we have a goal, then we can find businesses to help meet it. On Jan 25, 2008 12:09 PM, Robert Douglass <rob@robshouse.net> wrote:
Here's my take on the situation. There isn't very much really good in-depth writing about Views from the smart developer's standpoint. I'm not talking about how to do Views integration with your module, which is pretty well understood. There's a little more out there for CCK, and that might be one of the reasons more people feel equipped to develop CCK. CCK has already been around longer, and was the result of much more collaboration from the onset. These are just historical observations.
Where money might really make a difference in the long run would be to hire someone smart to really dive into Views 2 and write about how it works. The whole Views developer ecosystem is focused on "providing views integration with X" and lots of people can now do this. It's a different matter altogether, though, when it comes to understanding how it works in the back end.
-Robert
Earl Miles wrote:
Steve Dondley wrote:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
Depends what you mean by behind. I had a commitment to Panels before I had a commitment to Views 2, and it's not feasible to work seriously on both simultaneously. Once Panels 2 hit beta, Views 2 work started picking back up. That was less than a month ago.
4) CCK and Views module conversion is slow because they are complex modules done in people's spare time.
I spend a lot of sponsored time on Views 2. CCK is more spare time, but there is a bigger group working on CCK and they had a 4 month head start on me.
5) Paying experienced drupal coders to work on these project will speed development of these modules.
The main problem I see is getting developers up to speed. It requires my resources to teach people what I want them to do. That said, I can still use the help of a couple of really good devs, but I don't have time for devs who aren't already very familiar with Views. And I can count on my hands the number of devs I've spoken to who qualify, and I can count on my head the number of those devs who have time to commit to it (and that's with or without a monetary incentive).
6) Firms that build websites using Drupal have an interest in rolling out newer and better versions of Drupal so they remain competitive. 7) These firms have cash to pay experienced Drupal coders. 8) It would be wise to have these firms pool money together to help speed the development of Views and CCK.
PingVision offered, but I think they were expecting me to be more proactive about assembling resources. Unfortunately, one thing I am not is a good project manager -- I find it distracting and difficult to try to manage developers when what I really want to do is have my head deep in code, coming up with solutions.
-- Prometheus Labor Communications, Inc. http://prometheuslabor.com 413-572-1300 Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://communicateordie.com
i'll add that the CCK team has expressed a strong plea for funding in order to solve the "fields in core" task. this is a goal we all share for D7, but it isn't likely to happen without funding. it is a big task. if anyone is willing to fund this, i suggest contacting karen karen (http://drupal.org/user/45874) or yves (http://drupal.org/user/39567). -moshe On Jan 25, 2008 1:20 PM, Steve Dondley <sdondley+drupal@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, this struck me as the right answer, too. So, the next question is, what kind of budget would we be looking at? Once we have a goal, then we can find businesses to help meet it.
On Jan 25, 2008 12:09 PM, Robert Douglass <rob@robshouse.net> wrote:
Here's my take on the situation. There isn't very much really good in-depth writing about Views from the smart developer's standpoint. I'm not talking about how to do Views integration with your module, which is pretty well understood. There's a little more out there for CCK, and that might be one of the reasons more people feel equipped to develop CCK. CCK has already been around longer, and was the result of much more collaboration from the onset. These are just historical observations.
Where money might really make a difference in the long run would be to hire someone smart to really dive into Views 2 and write about how it works. The whole Views developer ecosystem is focused on "providing views integration with X" and lots of people can now do this. It's a different matter altogether, though, when it comes to understanding how it works in the back end.
-Robert
Earl Miles wrote:
Steve Dondley wrote:
1) CCK and Views modules conversion to Drupal 6 is far behind.
Depends what you mean by behind. I had a commitment to Panels before I had a commitment to Views 2, and it's not feasible to work seriously on both simultaneously. Once Panels 2 hit beta, Views 2 work started picking back up. That was less than a month ago.
4) CCK and Views module conversion is slow because they are complex modules done in people's spare time.
I spend a lot of sponsored time on Views 2. CCK is more spare time, but there is a bigger group working on CCK and they had a 4 month head start on me.
5) Paying experienced drupal coders to work on these project will speed development of these modules.
The main problem I see is getting developers up to speed. It requires my resources to teach people what I want them to do. That said, I can still use the help of a couple of really good devs, but I don't have time for devs who aren't already very familiar with Views. And I can count on my hands the number of devs I've spoken to who qualify, and I can count on my head the number of those devs who have time to commit to it (and that's with or without a monetary incentive).
6) Firms that build websites using Drupal have an interest in rolling out newer and better versions of Drupal so they remain competitive. 7) These firms have cash to pay experienced Drupal coders. 8) It would be wise to have these firms pool money together to help speed the development of Views and CCK.
PingVision offered, but I think they were expecting me to be more proactive about assembling resources. Unfortunately, one thing I am not is a good project manager -- I find it distracting and difficult to try to manage developers when what I really want to do is have my head deep in code, coming up with solutions.
-- Prometheus Labor Communications, Inc. http://prometheuslabor.com 413-572-1300
Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://communicateordie.com
Views UI currently has detailed mockups and a minimally working prototype for the main screen, latest progress is at [1], with further background discussion in the views developers group. There's been a lot of movement this week, and now it's narrowed down anyone ought to be able to help with refinements. As soon as the UI is workable, that'll make it much easier to write views handlers, which is likely to be the lowest barrier to entry for getting involved with actual coding. Obviously anyone starting early on this could also document the process to speed up integration of view-dependent modules when it gets closer to beta/rc. In terms of saving developer time, the views issue queue [2] is very busy. Helping with bug reports and support requests against Views 1 will make it a much friendlier place to work in when it comes to alpha testing Views 2. The Panels issue queue[3] is also pretty busy, so helping there saves developer time as well. [1] http://groups.drupal.org/node/8428 [2] http://drupal.org/project/issues/views [3] http://drupal.org/project/issues/panels
participants (8)
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catch -
Earl Miles -
Gerhard Killesreiter -
Greg Knaddison - GVS -
Moshe Weitzman -
Robert Douglass -
Ronald Ashri -
Steve Dondley