Community Strategy

My challenge goal to the Drupal community is that we have our contributed modules ported within a month of the D7 release to show our support for and be able to take advantage of the new Drupal core. As most of us know, it has been 10 months since the release of Drupal 6.0 and a fair number of large modules have either not been ported to D6 or did so only recently.

The idea is that, when D7 goes to code freeze, module developers would similarly freeze the feature development of their D6 releases and focus on conversion to D7. This strategy will reflect well on the community's commitment to maintain a solid code base and reap the benefits of all the cool new features in each new core release.

Proposal

In order to facilitate the achievement of this goal, I propose the following:

• Recast the 6.x to 7.x conversion roadmap documentation as the depository for developers to log the changes from D6 to D7
• Create another 6.x to 7.x conversion roadmap (from the above depository) organized into separate pages by topic, and
• Automate a great percentage of the changes in the 7.x release of Deadwood to be ready when D7 goes into code freeze

The Drupal community will benefit from the documentation change by:

• Making it easier for module developers to find the core changes relevant to their module,
• Clarifying for module developers the conversion routines to be applied by Deadwood,
• Providing a more organized history of core changes by release, and
• Helping everyone to understand the changes to core.

Similarly, the community will benefit from having Deadwood updated by the time D7 goes into code freeze by:

• Making it easier for module developers to port their code by significantly reducing the time commitment involved
• Increasing the time available to module developers to focus on new features for their D7 release
• Increasing the likelihood that developers will port their modules on a timely basis with the D7 release

As part of this effort to update Deadwood, I would appreciate the assistance of developers to test its conversion routines, help correct any errors and suggest enhancements. I would like to remind everyone that Deadwood is not intended to perform all conversions but rather to do a great percentage of the mundane changes needed to port a module, thus leaving only a minimum number of changes requiring manual attention.

Role Model

In my opinion, the Firefox plug-in developers are excellent role models for us. They have new versions of their plug-ins ready in conjunction with new Firefox releases. (Is there anyone who doesn't appreciate this?) Let's have the Drupal community emulate this practice.