Future Directions for OG6

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Grayside's picture

Hello folks, I've been trying to get a handle on my perspective as the latest maintainer of OG's 6.x branch. There is an entire, gigantic issue queue with ideas of what's wrong and where folks would like it to go. As I've tried to curate the queue, I've come to realize there should probably be some kind of discussion.

OG6's sun has already started to set, but it remains in use on thousands of websites. It's biggest challenges are not in exploring new features, but in supporting existing websites and new, stability-critical D6 websites by cleaning up the many warts: unexpected or incomplete behaviors, usability-challenged workflows, performance improvements, low-impact integrations with common modules (Features, etc), and if possible more thorough coverage by automated tests.

As mentioned in the Issue Queue, 6.x-2.2, with a slow year of enhancements and bugfixes, is almost ready. All that waits is fixing the broken tests and reverting Notifications 4.x support back to the more stable, known Notifications 2.x line.

What should be done after that?

After reading and closing (or prodding) pages and pages of issues, here are the areas (that I still remember) and now retroactively wish I'd tossed onto a Tag:

  • Broadcast: It shipped without being fully cooked.
  • Notifications Configuration: People are continually trying to use options that produce unexpected results. Either UI's or behaviors need some reshaping.
  • Per Content Type Configuration: Almost anything configured site wide for OG, someone has come along and asked to configure per content type. Coming up with some good generalized infrastructure (with tests) would go a long way to empowering more use cases.
  • Handling of Many Users, Many Groups: OG's widgets inconsistently scale out to dozens or hundreds of users or groups. Handling this, and doing it predictably, is addressed from many different directions.
  • Group Details Block: People want this to be made up of menu items. I'd like to see a separate OG Menu Links module take this on, and find some clean way to override the existing block or its contents.

Some pet peeves:

  • Fix Coding Standards: There are some issues with the OG Code, especially its sparse inline documentation.
  • Clean Up Post-Submit Workflows: Many of OG's forms seem to take users to unexpected places.
  • Better description text for Views integration: Because half the items can only be understood through trial and error.

And lastly, some way to redirect some of the flood of issues into other directions:

  • OG Access Documentation: It needs a handbook page. This page needs to cover the different types of group and group post options, expand on the different grants and how the alter hooks cover them, have an FAQ around common access control collission problems, and link to more generalized resources. This would eliminate the need for many issues.
  • OG Site Building to Forums & Stack Exchange: OG is such a common piece of the Drupal toolkit, coming to the issue queue for general purpose support requests adds clutter and gets newbies lost in said clutter. Redirect them elsewhere up front for all IA matters.

I mentioned "light integrations" before, just to be clear, I am primarily thinking in terms of Features/Strongarm integration, and similar low-impact areas that would really help developers that run into WTF's routinely because other modules just don't want to take responsibility for OG's stuff.

If that's what I think should happen, what do I think should not?

Little or nothing that breaks backwards compatibility. This module is fairly ubiquitous in a certain kind of Drupal site. There are a great many modules that extend it in a variety of interesting directions, many of them minimally maintained. At this point in OG6's career, I'd like to avoid shaking up the Organic ecosystem with too many API signature changes that would invalidate long-stable projects.

How will all this happen?

I honestly don't know. The amount of work even this narrower focus could absorb goes well beyond my available free time to support OG, and is certainly broader than my day job's interests (we don't even touch OG Notifications).

OG6 receives many more patches than reviews, and little enough in the way of solid patches for the number of open issues. In short, the needs review/RTBC density and velocity of items is low. Even the many critical issues don't seem to inspire much active collaboration, and this is a problem for a project this large.

I'm posting this in the hopes that we come to a consensus around worthy areas of focus, and that such a focus can help us take OG6 that one further step that the "rearguard" D6 community would like to see.

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