Drupal 8 - Core Initiatives Progress Update - 9/29/11 Edition

What this is about:
We've been hearing a lot from the community about wanting more transparency with regard to the Drupal 8 initiatives and their advancement. Every two weeks, the Drupal 8 initiative owners, along with Dries, webchick, and a team of project managers have “scrum of scrum” calls where each person goes around and talks about what they worked on since last time, what they’re going to work on for next time, where they’re blocked, and how the community can help.

So we're trying out this format for sharing these meeting minutes with you, and allowing a place for you to comment on and participate in these initiatives.

How you can get involved:
- Share your comments
- Contact an initiative leader to take on one of their action points!

Configuration Management

Greg Dunlap (heyrocker)

Status: Green

Headlines

• Held a code sprint in DrupalCamp Copenhagen that was really successful. We only had four participants, but a lot of work got done and everyone was able to get involved. We implemented the default config installation process (which moves a module's supplied default config to the live area on installation), and started on the implementations of the config system for the Site Information form and for image styles. We also started looking into the possibility of modifying variable_get()/variable_set() to the new system as a stopgap/backwards compatibility system while we convert everything. This effort got stalled because of some early bootstrap issues we need to sort out (we currently have no way to run the config system when the db isn't up yet.) We also got a lot of smaller issues done and the simple tests were upgraded and some new ones added. Since then I have been doing code reviews and trying to move remaining issues forward with people.
• I held my first IRC meeting and I was kind of disappointed in it. There was not a lot of engagement from the dozen or so attendees. However the second meeting was excellent. I believe that having a set agenda helped move that along much better. Meeting notes at http://groups.drupal.org/node/180759. We addressed many of the issues from the code sprint and these are moving forward as we speak.

Next steps

Continue implementations. My goal is to have two or three implementations done before we push forward core patches, so we can work out kinks in the system.

Call to Action

I would still love for someone to take a look at the XML encoding/decoding functionality to see if there are good ideas around how to handle that. See http://drupal.org/node/1288090.
There is also some discussion around the use of magic-named folders for holding the config that could use a lot more input. See http://drupal.org/node/1299424.

Web Services

Larry Garfield (Crell)

Status: Green

Headlines

• Got the new traversal logic committed.
• Merged in Symfony2 branch and refactored code to use it.
• Assigned people to work on 3 issues for next round: http://drupal.org/node/1260864, http://drupal.org/node/1279942, http://drupal.org/node/1100198
• Kicked off discussion about nothing
• Services folks are now using Symfony2 HttpFoundation in Services.

Next steps

• Try and get those 3 issues resolved this round.
• Use that to get us to a point of a first patch! (we hope!)

Call to action

• Review patches please! Contact Larry if you need something explained.

Design

Jeff Burnz (jmburnz)

Status

Amber

Headlines

• Spoke at Drupalcamp Copenhagen on the DI
• Posted proposal for our Desgin Brief, rough draft as wiki page in the d4d group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179079
• Clarified blocker on the d.o dev site: http://drupal.org/node/1262116

Next steps

• I want to begin some discussions on theme features
• Refine the Design Brief proposal
• Open discussions with Leisa and Prairie regarding DI requirements in d.o
• I would like to work on the whole Getting Involved page and make Design more prominent

Call to action

• Feedback on the design brief! Please comment and get involved! http://groups.drupal.org/node/179079
• Get ready for design submissions!

Multilingual

Gábor Hojtsy

Status

Green

Headlines

• Montreal Sprint was awesome! Find our report at http://groups.drupal.org/node/178469
• Worked with catch to get some stuff committed. Great to have catch as the Drupal 8 core co-maintainer, yay!
• Started a monster discussion about how we should structure language support in Drupal 8. Made some colorful visuals to highlight the different areas of responsibility in the language system to support splitting it up logically. Sun tweeted that the visuals are brilliant, so you better check them out: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179404
• Wrote a blog post to educate developers on the multilingual status-quo in D6/7, even if not happy and nice, that is what we have so far, also put in some forward looking statements for Drupal 8: http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2011-sep-28/drupal-developer-i-want-make-my-modules-fully-multilingual-friendly

Next steps

• Review ongoing patches in the queue
• Engage the UX team more, since we have lots of UX stuff going on at the moment

Call to Action

Longer term discussion:
- Provide feedback on overarching structure discussion: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179404
Near term top goals:
- Help review/work on English as a first class language: http://drupal.org/node/1266318
- Help review/work on moving path/domain setup to negotiation: http://drupal.org/node/1280530
- Help review/work on simplifying language list administration: http://drupal.org/node/1260860

PM Team

Angie Byron, Shannon Vettes, Melissa Anderson

Status

Green

Headlines

• Posted first meeting minutes (yay!) http://groups.drupal.org/node/177729
• Angie is keeping an eye on http://drupal.org/node/493154 (design.drupal.org) to see how she can help.
• She also attended the D8MI sprint at DrupalCamp Montreal and left a bunch of feedback in a bunch of issues.
• Working on an outline for capturing high-level goals / priorities / deadlines of initiatives / gratitude
• Helped find a D8 core maintainer. ;)

Next steps

• Work on formatting for capturing high-level goals of each initiative so we can define “done” acceptance criteria.
• Work on strategic organization points and think about scheduling

Action items

• Let us know what you think about this reporting format! Do you like it? Do you love it? Do you want more of it? We’d like to know if this is worthwhile to the community.