reyero.net

I started writing a comment for this great post Then I thought there are enough comments in there already so I'd rather write my own post.

And also because this is kind of a mission statement about the question: How would you define success for the Drupal project?

It was 2003, six years ago, when I got started with Drupal. My user id is 4299. A few months later I contributed my first module (i18n). I can't tell how many modules there were at that moment, but Internationalization module is node number 5917.

Too many things have happened since then, most of them good. The community has seen an explosive growth, my job is now 99% Drupal, we've been to all these great conferences, companies have risen around Drupal, and many of us have drunk pints and pints of beer using Drupal as a excuse :-)

We are now more than 200000 users and the site has more than half a million nodes (content pages). So everything has changed quite a bit. But there's this single thing that, though it's seen many improvements, is still fundamentally the same, just bigger: drupal.org.

I'm still here in León but getting everyting ready for flying to Paris tomorrow. I'll arrive on Wednesday evening so I'm afraid I'm missing the first day.

This year I'm not doing any session, I'm taking a break. But looking forward to other people's talks and to meet lots of old and new faces there. I'm sure it's goint to be great as usual.

This is an old post I sent to drupal-devel mailing list more than 3 years ago, I would like to revive as I think finally the small core / many distributions idea is gaining some ground. I haven't changed anything from the original post here, http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2005-November/011428.html

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A "great developer platform" is how I see Drupal, and I'm sure most of the developers too. But the thing is: we need some focus, some targets to agree on.

The problem is: currently we are pretending Drupal -core- to be too many things at the same time, mostly that great developer platform (1), but also an out of the box ready to use community portal (2) or kind of that. And the consequence is we are handling too many issues when fixing bugs for 'Drupal core' that are too specific of some more 'user level, site specific' modules.

As it seems a brand new Drupal localization site is coming to life any of these days, we still need to work out some issues like how the translations will be packaged to support all of our existing deployment models and maybe some new ones.

We've been thinking and talking for some time about it. This is about my specific proposal for solving this packaging issue.

Well, if you want to see a specific implementation of translations downloaded on the fly by the installer check out the Open Atrium latest (dev) version. As I explain below, this is a limited use case (Drupal distribution with known set of modules), so we've gone through some shortcuts here. But anyway it is a nice proof of concept of how you can automatically download/import/update translations. Yeah, it works!

Google is losing the battle against Facebook and they know it very well. Just a few days ago Google unveiled their vision of the future of the Internet, that's Google Wave. Google Wave is an amazing communication and collaboration tool that could very well reshape the future of the Internet, though it has some important drawback at the moment: it doesn't exist yet.

However, when we think about the Internet it doesn't matter that much where we are (that won't last much longer) as where we are going. This is important too for other tools that are shaping the Internet as we know it, like Drupal. These are just some thoughts about where we are going and what does it all mean for Drupal, which is the part of the Internet I'm more involved with.

Here I am again, in Washington DC attending the Drupal Conference.

This time I'm doing two presentations:

I'll be in Washington DC for this week, hanging out with the rest of Development Seed team.

A week plenty of interesting work and meetings ahead. And some party too of course :-)

I've had a pair busy weeks doing development and maintenance for contributed modules: Internationalization, Messaging, Notifications. All of them have got some new features and are on track for stable releases soon.

However, one of the the things I've realized (again) is that I've ended up maintaining way too many huge modules and maybe one of the ways to keep them moving faster is to break them down when it makes sense, and also to hand over maintenance to some more people. Now we have Mail2web (Ian Ward is the new maintainer) and Language Icons (Freso is helping with that one), more may be coming in the next future....

The other thing I've realized is that it is exhausting maintaining both 5.x and 6.x versions of a module. That means developing and testing everything twice with slight changes which is actually harder than working on two different projects. The thing is that Drupal 6 seems to be taking some time to become the main development version for new sites and more work is done with Drupal 5 yet.

I'm leaving on Sunday, so these days I've been quite busy preparing everything for the Boston Drupalcon 2008.