[development] Jaza's modules are up for adoption

[Jeremy Epstein]

Hi all,

As many of you know, I will soon (on 19th Feb, exactly 4 weeks from
now) be embarking on a 12-month world trip. Once I leave, I will be on
the move, and as far as Drupal stuff goes, I will be out of action.

I am currently the primary (and the only) CVS maintainer of 4 contrib
modules. 3 of them (the first 3 below) in particular are quite
popular, and seriously need to be maintained in my absence. The 4th is
not that popular (AFAIK), but if someone would like to continue
maintaining it, I would be very grateful, and I doubt that it would be
much work.

Here are the 4 modules for which I am seeking a new maintainer:

---

1. Category <http://drupal.org/project/category>

Status: upgraded to 5.x, and is reasonably stable, but has numerous
outstanding bugs.

Description: a very popular module. A very controversial module. Needs
a lot of TLC. Needs a maintainer who is eager to get his/her feet wet.
As well as bug fixing, has plenty of room for those willing to spend
time developing new features, or improving existing features. Several
people have been working the issue queue lately, and submitting a
number of patches. You know who you are, and you're more than welcome
to apply as the new module maintainer.

2. Active select <http://drupal.org/project/activeselect>

Status: upgraded to 5.x (including porting of JS to jQuery), and is
reasonably stable, but has some outstanding bugs.

Description: provides a JS widget and an API that allows one select
box to dynamically update other select boxes. The category module is
the only module (AFAIK) that currently uses activeselect (category
works better with activeselect, although it doesn't depend on it).
Maintaining this module should be relatively easy, as it is a small
and simple module, only needing occasional bug fixes. However, for
those with big ideas, there is also some room for new features in this
module.

3. Import / Export API <http://drupal.org/project/importexportapi>

Status: 4.7 version only, is reasonably stable, and has some outstanding bugs.

Description: this was my Summer of Code 2006 project. It's a massive
module, and one that I managed to bring up to a stable and usable (and
quite well-documented) level during SoC, but that I certainly wouldn't
consider finished by any means. Needs a lot of TLC, and is seeking a
maintainer who is prepared to give it all their love. In particular,
needs to be upgraded to Drupal 5, needs serious UI improvement (the UI
needs a lot more development, and ideally needs to be moved to a
separate project), needs VERY serious performance improvement
(currently the memory overhead makes dealing with large datasets quite
hard - probably the underlying architecture needs serious improvement
in order to fix this), and needs a number of new features (e.g.
validation and error-reporting of import data, proper processing
callbacks to handle special operations for various entities, etc). The
amount of code is large, and the complexity is high. But it's all
quite high-quality, and also quite well-documented, so this should
make the module easier to grok.

4. DB Cron <http://drupal.org/project/dbcron>

Status: 4.7 version only, is very stable, and has no outstanding issues.

Description: a simple module that lets you run a set of SQL queries at
regular intervals using cron. I wrote it for the category module demo
site <http://category.greenash.net.au/demosite/>, to refresh the
site's database every 2 hours. This is the module's main application,
but I'm sure it has others. Apart from needing a Drupal 5 upgrade,
this module requires very minimal maintenance (it currently has an
empty issue queue). Anyone interested in having an easy little module
under their belt, feel free to take it over.

---

Anyone interested in taking over maintainership of any of the above 4
modules, please email me directly. If you can't see my email address
(because you're reading this in the archives, rather than as an email,
perhaps), then please use my contact form at
<http://drupal.org/user/15277/contact>. Anyone interested in being a
maintainer should have a Drupal contrib CVS account, and should have
some experience with developing and/or maintaining Drupal modules (at
minimum, should have submitted some patches to core or contrib).
Experience with the above modules is not essential, but is desirable.

I will be around, available, and active for the next 4 weeks. I am
more than happy to get the new maintainers of my modules up to speed,
as best I can in the short time that I have before I leave.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has
helped me with these modules over the past year, and to thank the
whole Drupal community for just being awesome :P.

I sincerely hope that this is NOT the end of my time as part of the
Drupal community. In fact, I couldn't imagine my life without Drupal
(the code, or the people). I am most definitely planning to return to
Drupal development when I finish my world trip, although I understand
that by appointing new maintainers, I am relinquishing primary control
of my current modules forever. No doubt, by the time my trip is over,
Drupal will be several versions ahead, and so much will have changed
that I'll have to learn everything all over again. As long as Drupal
hasn't switched to Java, I'm sure it will still be a codebase that I
can love ;-).

Also, for everyone who is going to DrupalCon SF in March, I'll be
there (I've planned my trip around it), and I'm sure I'll see you
there!

Many thanks,

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
www.greenash.net.au