[consulting] Drupal Primer Course

[Greg Knaddison - GVS]

On 4/12/06, Lists <listout at accidentaltechie.org> wrote:
> (I think this 'on to 4.8!' kind of thinking is shooting ourselves in the
> foot to spite our leg.)

You may want to expand more on that beyond just shooting it out there,
because I think most folks agree that training is preparation for the
future and the future is 4.7 and 4.7+ (my personal quibble on this
future talk, let's call it 4.7+, calling it 4.8 can handcuff us into
releasing it as "4.8" even if it deserves to be "5.0").

> 4.6.6 is the latest, most stable release of Drupal, and that's _the only
> Drupal_ that I recommend live sites use right now.

Ok.

> What's the "mad rush" to always be promoting the next 2 versions down the
> road, instead of the actual current stable release?

Supporting user bases on multiple versions of software is a drain on
resources - support, bug fixing, everything - spends extra time.  This
is true for commercial software companies and open source and mixes of
the two.  It's great if you can provide an easy enough upgrade path
(and compelling new features) so that people will upgrade to try to
reduce that pain.

> Is this the general
> tendency with Drupal?

I would say it's just the tendency with software.  If you disagree I'd
love to hear examples of companies that /don't/ motivate people to
upgrade.

> Is someone actually at the wheel, following a road
> map?

The top down view:
http://drupal.org/node/46638

But as Dries says in that document: "Code is contributed, or it is
not."  You can't really set a roadmap and then expect volunteers to
follow it.

I think the tradition of doing predictions is an interesting way of
creating a community based roadmap:
http://drupal.org/node/41966

I'm not sure this is the right place for this discussion - so if you
want to take it further the general forum is probably a better place.

As I said, for training people expect the "new stuff" so yes, they
expect to learn about the software that lives in HEAD and not so much
the software that lives in the previous stable release.

Regards,
Greg

--
Growing Venture Solutions | Denver, CO
Technology Solutions for Communities and Small Businesses
http://growingventuresolutions.com/