Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Addi Berry, Matt Westgate, and Jeff Robbins reminisce on the past 6 years of Lullabot, running a virtual company, the ways in which Drupal has changed, and visit a few of the projects we've worked on.
Addison Berry, Kent Bye, Jared Ponchot, Joe Shindelar & Michelle Lauer do a one-year retrospective of the Drupalize.me video subscription site of Drupal training videos. We cover some of our lessons learned and what has evolved over the past year in terms of the site as well as our internal processes.
Topics discussed include:
Special considerations for setting up a recurring payment subscription service
Moving payment system from PayPal to Authorize.net
Difference between having gateway payment profiles vs. having Drupal control it
Payment & discount option flexibility with Authorize.net
Development environment considerations for e-commerce sites
Changing to a more rapid prototyping design process after the initial design of a site has been established
The evolution of the project management and release cycle management
Joe Shindelar, Earl Miles, Ryan Szrama, Greg Dunlap, Sally Young, Jeff Eaton, Jason Pamental, and Jeff Robbins wrap up the Do It With Drupal conference and take questions from the audience.
In this podcast, Kent Bye talks with Jeff Eaton and a couple of the top Drupal core contributors from Drupal 7, Daniel "sun" Kudwien and Nathaniel "catch" Catchpole. They discuss the maintainability of Drupal core, a retrospective of the ups and downs of the Drupal 7 development cycle, and alternate roadmaps for the future of Drupal core. Developer burnout is also becoming more of an issue, and they talk about the importance of recruiting more "code gardeners" to help review and evaluate core patches.
Although the online comments about these topics have been contentious at times, we feel that they need to be discussed, with the goal of improving Drupal for everyone. Listen in for a wide-ranging and engaging discussion about the Drupal project and the concerns some of the core contributors are wrestling with today.
Show notes
At the beginning of DrupalCon London, one of the top Drupal core developers named Daniel Kudwien (aka ""sun") posted a blog called "The Drupal Crisis" about the woes of the Drupal 7 development cycle. He claimed that "Drupal core is not maintainable anymore. There's too much cruft. Too many half-baked features that no one actually maintains." and that "We need to be a solid framework, and also a basic but extensible CMS, like we've always been."
After lots of discussion on this post, sun wrote a follow-up blog post with a number of conclusions, including, "We need to discuss, propose, agree, and define what we are able and want to maintain in Drupal core," "which core features are actually product features," and "whether we can or want to move product features into a separate product project in the long-term."
Channelling this interest into action, sun created a number of different issues within the drupal.org issue queue including this list of Discussion items and this "Make core maintainable" issue, which generated nearly 300 comments.
The "Make core maintainable" issue quickly turned into a discussion of which modules to remove from Drupal 8 core, and the question of what should stay and what should go led some core developers like Crell, eaton and catch to call for a more defined set of heuristics that the Drupal core maintainers could use in determining what should be included within the Drupal core product.
This discussion eventually led Jeff Eaton to create a spin-off issue called "Establish heuristics for core feature evaluation" that tries to lay out a list of criteria for evaluating which features should stay and what modules should go.
Asking what modules belong in core and which ones should be removed can be answered differently depending on whether you see Drupal as a primarily as a generalized CMS product or whether you see it as a development framework for a specific site. It's actually both a framework and a CMS product, but this tension has brought the Drupal project to a crossroads when trying to make these types of decisions of what to include in the main project and what core developers are responsible for maintaining.
Eaton talked more about this tension between product and framework at DrupalCon London in his presentation called "Product, Framework, or Platform?" Instead of creating a false dichotomy between the Product vs. Framework, eaton is using the term of "Platform" in order to incorporate both the CMS product and anything else that can be created with the module system and development framework.
Another top core developer Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) wrote up a couple of related blog posts including "Why all the drama?", where he does a bit of a retrospective as to what went wrong with the D7 development cycle from his perspective.
Catch also took a stab at expanding on the Drupal Framework vs. Product debate in another blog post called "Framework, Platform, Application, Features, Product, Workload" where he reiterates that Drupal is a hybrid of the two. He lays out a more nuanced and complicated 5-layered system for how he thinks of it, which is mentioned in this podcast a couple of times.
At the bottom of his post, catch points to a number of follow-up and related initiatives. Catch and sun created the "Unofficial Drupal 8 Framework initiative" that includes a lot of the low-level API clean-up.
In this podcast, catch and sun talk about the need to simplify and de-couple the system.module's responsibilities in order to do unit testing and make core debugging more manageable. Here's a list of issues tagged as part of this framework initiative.
A related topic throughout all these discussions has been burnout of core developers. Randy Fay held Core Conversation about Burnout at DrupalCon London that is well worth watching. Fay also looked into a lot of research about burnout, and wrote an excellent series of blog posts:
In his Drupal Crisis post, sun says that "there are many more Drupal contributors who kept silent about their personal feelings for too long. In the end, we have several critical communication problems about fundamental topics in our community." This has been contributing to the feeling of burnout.
One solution to core burnout is to recruit more help for the core development workload. Sun and catch talk about the need in the Drupal core development community to recruit and mentor more people who "code gardeners" can test and evaluate patches.
Bringing up issues and having productive conversations are the first steps to finding solutions. We hope this discussion provides a valuable contribution to the conversation.
The reigning king of web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, speaks with Lullabot's Jared Ponchot and Jeff Robbins about the evolution and future directions of web technology. Jeffrey will be keynoting at this year's Do It With Drupal conference in October.
Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy, and founder of Global Moxie talks about mobile design and development with Lullabot's Jared Ponchot and Jeff Robbins. Josh will be keynoting at The Do It With Drupal Conference in October.
Angie Byron, Jeff Eaton, Kent Bye, Karen Stevenson, Jared Ponchot, Blake Hall, and Andrew Berry join Jeff Robbins to reminisce about DrupalCon Chicago.
Jeff Robbins talks with Matt Westgate, Nate Haug, and The Recording Academy's Kevin Colligan about Lullabot's process for developing, deploying, testing, and scaling GRAMMY.com, the website for the GRAMMY music awards.
Mentioned in the podcast is LoadStorm.com for distributed load testing.
For more information for how to configure Varnish, Memecache, APC and make other performance tunings in Drupal, then be sure to check out our hands-on Drupal Performance & Scalability video available for purchase individually or as part of the subscription-based Drupalize.me.
Views and Panels creator, Earl Miles, joins Jeff Eaton, Kent Bye, Seth Brown, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the Drupal App Store and how to raise $2,731,140 so Earl can buy a Ferrari. read more »
