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!

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

This time I'm doing two presentations:

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.

To the question "Will Drupal 6 be multilingual?", I just can say that it will be "more multilingual than Drupal 5", but really cannot give a straight "Yes" answer as it is not really fully multilingual because there are a big number of parts that cannot yet be localized or translated.
This is the latest try and our last chance for Drupal 6. There's a very minimum set of patches to at least allow contributed modules to hook into the right places of Drupal core and have a fully multilingual Drupal 6 without using dirty hacks or core patches in contributed modules.

• http://drupal.org/node/155047, Object translation. Wrapper function for contrib modules
• http://drupal.org/node/155381, Minimum support for multilingual variables
• http://drupal.org/node/155282, Add db rewriting to blocks query

From this month I will be working part time for Development Seed which is quite an exciting prospect for me because of both, the nature of their projects