The team from last week's Australian workshop is home again and mostly recovered from the jet-lag which means it's time to start looking ahead to the next round! We're heading to Minneapolis in a few weeks to bring our merry little road show to the US midwest for the first time in almost a year.

Our curriculum is all up to date for Drupal 6 and we're really enjoying teaching some of the new features. The theme system changes in Drupal 6 have made our theming and jquery workshop really rock. Personally, Jeff Eaton has me super excited about the FormAPI 3.0 changes and we've put together some great information for the API workshop.

Quick head's up: Early bird pricing ends April 18th - so don't miss out. Hope to see you in Minnesota!

By now, most of you have probably heard about the plans to close the Drupal Contrib Repository (DCR) to new module projects. While I understand and generally agree with most of the reasons for this decision, I wonder if it isn't a bit hasty or shortsighted.

First let me outline my understanding of the reasons behind this decision:

There are currently close to 2,750 modules in the DCR. These are the modules that have been created by and are maintained, to a varying degree, by the community. They are not part of the core Drupal distribution and they're quality, performance, and usefulness varies greatly. While there are general guidelines that module developers are supposed to follow when contributing their work, many developers misinterpret or outright ignore these guidelines. Many developers contribute modules which have names which are confusing and jargony (Login Toboggan!?) or just similar to other modules (Feed, FeedAPI, SimpleFeed, Feed Field -or- Link, Link Node, Link to Content, Link to Us, Links Block, Links Views RSS, Links Package).

And watching the feed of new modules, it seems like the vast majority of new modules duplicate the functionality of existing projects in one way or another. These developers may feel they have come up with a better way to implement a given feature, but the truth is that usually their modules are just confusing in different ways.

Additionally, a simple download of the DCR is almost 500MB. In addition to the bandwidth costs shouldered by the Drupal Association, we need to consider Drupal administrators across the globe who have only a dial-up connection. A download of this size would take almost a week over a 56K modem connection and that's assuming that no one tries to call in during the download.

By closing the DCR to new modules, more focus can be put on improving the modules that are currently in the repository. Additionally, more developers can, and should, focus on the themes, theme engines, install profiles, and translations repositories. Since I am an American, I don't really know much about the translations repository, but there is certainly a lot of work that can be done creating more and better themes, theme template engines, and installation profiles.

The philosophy that has guided the code in Drupal core is one of the biggest assets of the Drupal project. But it's never been disseminated in a structured way to the community and it's also evolved over time.

With the rapid growth of Drupal and the number of new people coming into the community, then it's more and more important that Drupal be more proactive and intentional in promoting the design philosophies that have helped fuel Drupal's growth and success. In the final session time slot of Drupalcon, Jeff Eaton and James Walker kicked off this conversation about "The Art of Drupal."

CivicActions' Owen Barton talked about the relationship between Information Architecture (IA) and Drupal Architecture, specifically how to go from the IA to Drupal. He went through how he goes through this, and how it works into wider processes.