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The Drupal Massacre

Submitted by nk on Thu, 2011-09-01 19:25

Blog module has been stabbed in the git! Profile is dead! The rebels have their hands on trigger! Are these the days of Drupal Armaggeddon?

Absolutely to the contrary! After some core developers got really frustrated (and wrote some blog posts in fashion) an issue was started on Aug 21, 2011 to remove some 16 modules from core. The declared goal was to lighten the burden of maintaing core.

During the days of DrupalCon, we talked face to face, spent hours on the phone with those who missed the conference and wrote a few comments in the issue. The community have risen to meet this challenge like never before. In a span of eight days some 200 replies were posted. The list of the 16 condemned very quickly shrunk to seven, then shrunk more by saying, some parts of these modules need to be kept. That profile actually died wasn't a big surprise, it was already hidden in new D7 installations. The removal of blog, however, became another catalyst. The issue turned into a fantastic discussion of what the Drupal product should be, how should it be delivered and so on. No other modules are in imminent danger of being nuked. Even trigger might survive :)

Meanwhile, threefour modules got new maintainers in core (dixon took comment, larowlan took forum, amateescu poll, and swentel shortcut), and deekayen voluntereed to maintain blog in contrib.

I am extremely proud of our community: even in these frustrated, desperate, passionate, heated moments there was not a single name-calling, flamewar-inducing post. Instead people have shown they care about Drupal and their fellow contributor's opinion. Any doubts over the health of the Drupal community are most certainly gone. There's an astonishing amout of energy, let's hope we can harness it to get bugs closed and onramp (nee Snowman) install profile developed along with the official core initiatives.

Commenting on this Story is closed.

Submitted by Jacine on Fri, 2011-09-02 08:09.

It's really great to see the course this discussion has taken, and that such positive results were achieved in such a short period of time. Kudos to dixon, larowian, amateescu, swentel and deekayen for stepping up to maintain these modules, and to you for starting the conversation.

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2011-09-02 10:13.

I personally would have liked to have seen forum, poll, trigger and shortcut moved to contrib.

Reason?

The forum stinks. It has since Drupal 5.x. Has any new useful functionality been added to it over the years? Not really. It's still a very basic forum.

Same goes for blog.

My point is, that modules actually provide end user use cases thrive better in contrib. They are more useful use-cases and features added to them.

Take admin menu vs. shortcut. Everyone has used admin menu in the past. Shortcut is a dumbed down version of that. It could live just as easily in contrib and installs auto-magically into a standard drupal via an install profile. *Cough* 8 months *Cough* http://drupal.org/node/682000

I'd like more "core tested" contrib modules. Have the core team write some tests for the modules and then let them mature outside of the core world.

I wish the cuts went deeper.

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2011-09-02 12:05.

Thanks for the insightful and informed comment. I am sure you have read the linked issue before you made the well renowned Mr. Anonymous' opinion known to the world in this most appropriate place for it.

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2011-09-02 12:56.

The anonymous comment also doesn't make any sense. Shortcut module isn't a "dumbed down version" of Admin Menu; they are serving different purposes, and once http://drupal.org/node/742184 gets in it will be possible to use them together (i.e., have the shortcuts appear inside the admin menu).

David Rothstein

Submitted by hurricane on Sat, 2011-09-03 10:26.

Everyone dedicating their time and efforts contributing to core should have a medal. In my world you're heros.

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2011-09-02 19:00.

The movement was something else. It was about making the core lighter and less complex/complicated by moving some modules to the contrib, which I fully support the initiative. It was not about finding new maintainers for some core modules.

There is only one thing which I really do not understand, other than Dries resistance to the movement; its your resistance?

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2011-09-06 07:20.

Nice work. Removing those two make a lot of sense, and perhaps the blog module would be able to see more changes then it have through the last major Drupal releases?

I had a quick look at api.drupal.org to see how many functions & methods we get rid of, and where they all fit in with the other core modules. Are there plans to reduce the complexity of the API in D8? And since profile got kicked out (finally), does this means that profile2 is not going into D8, too keep the core lean and mean?

--
steinmb

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2011-10-18 06:49.

I think its necessary and essential to join the conference and meetings rather than to disuses on phones.
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