Welcome
Welcome to the brainstorming group for the 2014 Drupal.org roadmap! This group is to help the Drupal.org Software Working Group gather community input into the 2014 budget and plans for Drupal.org improvements. Please read the announcement for more background/details.
Latest ideas Most popular Recent Comments
To participate:
- Review the list of submitted proposals and "vote up" and/or comment on ones that speak to you.
- If you don't see your idea reflected, propose your own ideas using the idea template.
- While we want to hear about everything that's on your mind, we're especially interested in small, but impactful ideas.
- Proposals are wiki pages, so feel free to provide additional details in other peoples' proposals; think of them as "issue summaries" for ideas, so keep them neutral.
Voting/feedback will considered until 00:00 GMT on September 6, 2013, in order to give us ample time to make a proposal (which the results here will be a part of) for the Drupal Association Board Retreat prior to DrupalCon Prague. Thanks for participating!
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Recent comments
Right now there is a barrier
Right now there is a barrier to contributing to the development of Drupal.org, in that it's hard to find information on how that is done. A user has to discover that it's the drupalorg module (http://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg). The install is buggy (I had to remove a requirement for a module), and I'm not sure how one gets a copy of the database to have something representing the current website, with which to work.
If we can remove this barrier, by having some sort of tried and tested installation of drupal.org on our local machines, it would open up development of the website to a much wider pool of developers. Patches could be submitted for DO, same as they are for Drupal right now.
Of course, having everyone and anyone being able to develop for DO would require some direction. So if some sort of project map could be put together, and turned into items that are open for anyone to develop, so that anyone who wants to put in their hand in the site development can do so.
I personally am in favor of keeping everything on Drupal.org. We have a community, and it's important to keep that community together. Having everything on DO, gives a sense of being a part of a central community, and if contributing to the development of DO is made as barrier-free as possible, we should be able to build anything we need to our own needs as the Drupal community, rather than relying on 3rd party services.
How many is "many"?
Three or 4 dozen? The change was made 5 days ago.
Now how about a link to Drupal Answers on the DO home page (in the footer region)?
And maybe a mention on the /start page, or the /support page? Maybe even the /community page?
I wonder if Gitlab could also
I wonder if Gitlab could also be themed to at least use the Drupal logo, since the cohesive nature of everything being on d.o is very important to the sense of community. I noticed drush have moved and having to go to github to get Drush honestly feels like it's no longer a Drupal project.
Hopefully using gitlab is a decent compromise, I'm really scared a github move is going to destroy the sense of community on d.o, something most developers who're jumping on the bandwagon probably haven't considered.
I think the spirit of
I think the spirit of requiring a thorough review of a new project is not to prevent entry to maintainership but to help mentor the submitter. This helps insure that they are aware of all of the resources for building a successful module and gets them connected to members of the community. The added bonus is that projects that are not ready to be published don't get published.
Demographics in this group and the discussions
One aspect that is quite important to factor in when going through all the proposal to pick candidates is the demographics of those who have participated.
I believe we can quite safely say it is heavily skewed at developers. After all, just by looking at the proposals we see that the majority is about developing code. That actually becomes even clearer when sorting the proposals on number of votes.
Then those of us who are not first and foremost code developers are here because we are passionate about Drupal and the community.
Now, don't take that as saying developers aren't passionate. I know you are at least equally passionate.
However, we are community members that have high motivations to be here and we are prepared to spend a lot of our time not only on this, but also to learn the things that we think will move us forward.
I also believe we in general are more tech savvy than all those Drupal users out there who mainly see, and have an interest of using Drupal as a tool to run their website on. Those users put their own interests first. Specifically business interests. At the end of the day it is those business interests that make it possible for Drupal to exists.
Then we have all those potential new users. Those who haven't been exposed to Drupal yet. Maybe they have heard of it, but they haven't checked it out yet.
Very few, if any, of these users have a voice here. We can only guess their needs and try and include them in the discussions.
But, to be honest, I don't think we have had much success about that here. Not really.
I don't blame anyone for this, its just how things like this goes. We are passionate about Drupal. We also, to some extent, put focus on our own needs and forget much of the rest.
But we must work harder on changing that. Just take the most popular proposal:
While I know everyone in favour of that has all the best intentions in mind, it is also something that, especially for "outsiders", can be seen as negatives, such as:
But also assuming:
Most importantly, and especially for new potential users and business - It sends the message:
That last one is just a shot in our own foot to many.
So, while we are enthusiastic and busy discussing all the proposals here, lets not forget to put it in the right perspectives. We must factor in the silent majority of Drupal users. The majority that pays the bill and most likely have no idea this is being discussed right now.
Sorry if I sound negative. But if you think of it, these things are the big reasons for why drupal.org is in the state it is in and why we are discussing this.
The discussion that has
The discussion that has evolved over time (what is see mostly is, is to move repositories to other websites, mostly github) seems to be mostly about the usability of Drupal.org for different tasks.
Personally i would like to see d.o. be a central hub of everything Drupal, it communicates an indirect way of a real community, instead of modules scattered around the internet, also what if a 3rd party provider calls its quits?
But i also see the point in moving things to github for instance, the ease of use, speed, usability and a platform focussed on sharing code.
If we want to keep d.o. a centralised hub for code, documentation, help pages, discussion etc. we need in some way improve a lot on d.o.
Basically, best case scenario would be to combine a Github, Documentation platform, super cozy community website to be Drupal.org in the future. Right now it lacks some of those things so that people turn to better options for specific scenarios (like github). What you will get is that some people will just don't bother anymore at some point (new people for instance who know how github works, but can't bring up the patience to get to know the d.o. platform).
How we are going to achieve this? I don't know, who is in charge for it right now? Is there a budget? If not, crowdfunding? Letting the community work on d.o. as well?
TL;DR: Keep Drupal.org the hub for everything Drupal, improve on speed and features.
Upgrading statistics
@webchick
This is a little off-topic, but still relevant. Bryan Ruby (CMS Report) raised an interesting observation about Drupal adoption, and the release success of new majors, in this comment. Its about sites adopting and upgrading to Drupal majors.
It got me wondering. Do we have any statistics or other information about this? Particularly interesting is to know how many that opts to upgrade to new majors and when they do that.
If not, it would be a great thing for the DA to do. It could initially be done as a survey amongst Drupal shops. They should be able to shed quite a bit of light about this.
In theory it works. In
In theory it works. In practice it won't. A project with 5 line .info file and 20 line .module file may still be a good project and can be promoted automatically. But what happen after that?
Online is good and will get us started, but...
wouldn't it be better to get this discussion in front of a lot of people? DrupalCon Prague is just past and Austin is a ways off in June, what about approaching the BADCamp organizers and putting together an Summit to discuss this? Most of the big thinkers and community organizers will be there. Seems to me that might help get some traction.
As Angie put it, just a thought exercise.
BTW my vote goes to the support our community with best technologies integrated into Drupal. I don't think we can afford to fragment the community, that's the main saving grace for Drupal. That's why I'm here, and why lots of people stay. It may be a simplistic way of looking at things, but we face the realistic possibility of becoming forum-sub groups on a PHP board. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, but sometimes the wheel needs to be modified to fit the vehicle. Can't drag race with wagon wheels.
As far as the color of my bikeshed in '17... glow in the dark bioshed, grown using jellyfish bioengineered 3d printed graphene framework.
I added another choice to the
I added another choice to the list above: self-hosted, well-integrated, best-of-breed tools, not because I even know which direction I think is best, but because I think it's a valid option that deserves exploration.
For me, the list makes a fine entry point to the larger conversation LeeHunter, tsvenson, and mradcliffe and others are encouraging. I don't think we can make wise choices about the options for Drupal.org without a much higher-level conversation. When I try to compare the main options for the site, it helps me articulate some of the questions I'd want to consider before trying to make such a choice:
It's hard for me to seriously consider solutions before having a well-articulated problem space. I know we have a lot of pain points now, some of which appear to have mutually exclusive solutions, especially in the context of fininte resources. I figure nothing about this conversation will be easy, whether it begins at 10,000 feet or deep in implementation details.
There are many links to
There are many links to Drupal Answers, especially since this change was made.
I encourage you to update your profile on drupal.org to link to your Drupal Answers profile url.
Cross-linking
Cross-linking https://groups.drupal.org/node/312828 which has a discussion that may overlap with this proposal.
Goals based on role oriented needs
I completely agree with you Lee. We definitely need a set of long term goals and principles for being able to evolve drupal.org in the right direction.
For the last few years we have been trying to catch up with the past really. Instead we need to focus on the future needs.
For me that means we need to improve our UX strategy and make it central part throughout everything we do within the community.
Michael Keara (@UserAdvocate) wrote an excellent comment, https://groups.drupal.org/node/313088#comment-956588, to the UX Strategy proposal, presenting some starting points for us.
Agreed. Our current review
Agreed. Our current review process, and the champions in there, are already having a mountain to climb. We don't need to make it even bigger.
Also, the current process is based on an educational and trust system. When the reviewers have found that applicants respect our guides and also are skilled enough to produce high quality code, then that shows the applicant have earned community trust.
In the rare cases someone would go rogue, then it can be dealt with and in worst case the permission be revoked. The extra work this would inflict is negligible compared to if every new project was to be reviewed.
The Smartest Guys in the Room - what do you mean by this??
Maybe it was a bad analogy. But the title fits.
There is an arrogance or hubris in some corners that Drupal is better than anything else. I think that is a factor in why there is no link to to Drupal Answers on the DO site.
This subject has been vigorously debated before. The link below has 300+ posts. But then nothing changed. did it?
https://drupal.org/node/1236290
One of the posts used a great expression - "eating your own dog food".
Microsoft and Blackberry thought they were the smartest guys in the room, and they may have been for a while, but that never last for long.
I opened a proposal for #1 in
I opened a proposal for #1 in the list at this link, but didn't get around to #2 through #5 ... If you re-brand this issue "Improve the Project Applications Process", then they would apply here.
https://drupal.org/node/2034437
The full proposal definition behind the meta issue can be found here:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/291343
I agree with the consistency
I agree with the consistency of this proposal. I disagree that we need a human moderation at all. IMHO removing moderation for the first project is the way to go.
Additional moderation can be achieved by automated tools and post-reviews (and it could be used only for objective criteria like security holes, license infringements, spam, etc).
.
I think this could be a proposal.
We should be asking Drupal contributors relevant questions to find out their processes, pain points, etc... currently and assess and analyze this for the next several years.
To expand on what I wrote previously:
I think we can find out a lot of information that will help influence the best outcome whether that is keeping infrastructure on drupal.org or distributing processes across several independent web sites.
Edit: webchick already pointed out this is the plan for 2014 anyway. Sorry for spam.
I would like to add to this
I would like to add to this proposal some project review points:
All of them should have a link to open an issue for the respective subject. For example, phpcs cannot catch some coding standards that can be found on manual review.
Projects that meet all points could get a quality badge and be filtered by a tag on the project search page.
Let me know if this is a good addition to this proposal or if I should open a new proposal for it.
Principles?
Before talking about ways and means, it might be helpful to start with some guiding principles or goals. Whatever we want to make of drupal.org in 2017, it should be for the purpose of achieving those goals and in keeping with those principles.
I'm thinking they might be something like this:
Anything else?