Drupalaton Day Zero: Drupal 8 shipped - you didn’t miss the boat already?
Saturday, 15th August 2015Drupalaton Day Zero: Drupal 8 shipped - you didn’t miss the boat already?
Shit.
“Shit, shit, shit!” exclaimed the guy sitting next to me, bashing his fingers away on his laptop in the reception area of Hotel Helikon, an ageing family summer fun destination perched on the southern shores of lovely lukewarm shallow Lake Balaton in Hungary where I had arrived a day early for the yearly Drupal event Drupalaton.
You wouldn’t have noticed the extra sweat on my forehead in the sweltering 36 degrees heat, but these words made me nervous, for these weren't the words I was expecting to hear come from Daniel Wehner, the person who has the most commit mentions in Drupal 8. Had Drupal 8 broken horribly? Had some big problem just been found? No - well, not exactly. It was to do with supporting a beta-to-beta update path - more on that in a moment, for the moment let’s bring everyone up to speed.
Patch me in!
“But Steve, wait a code-damn minute there - what’s a ‘Commit mention in Drupal 8’ when it’s at home?" I hear some of you say! It means you were involved in some way in something that ended up being part of the core package of the next version of Drupal, version 8. What is Drupal? It’s a piece of software which currently powers over a million websites around the world. Everyone from those who accidentally became a Drupal developer whilst looking for a solution to help their tennis club to those in charge of running the United States use Drupal to communicate with their community via the web - see more examples over at this showcase of Drupal sites.
Drupal is a Free Software project (you may have heard it incorrectly referred to as 'Open Source'). This means anyone in the world is free to participate in the project - you can use it, study how it works, make changes, and share those changes if you want. A commit mention means you might have fixed a bug, reviewed some code, or been involved in some way with helping an issue move along the process until it has been deemed reviewed and tested by the community (“R.T.B.C.”) and thus ready to be committed to the codebase of the Drupal project. OK, now let’s get back to Hotel Helikon!
Getting on the Island
Later that evening after I’d unpacked and had a little wander around, I chatted with Daniel out on the island which, by daylight every inch of the hotel's small private enclave surrounded by the lukewarm shallow water of the lake is covered with holidaying families. Once a year, by night, the island becomes a hotbed of Drupal chat, especially this time as we are so tantilisingly close to release which has been worked on for four years now since the release of Drupal 7 in 2011.
“BDFL!” Daniel suddenly exclaimed. I thought for a moment - I didn’t recognise the acronym at first, thinking it may have been some internal subsystem only a few people knew as seemed the way with previous versions of Drupal to 8 which is now far more easier to approach using standard industry practices. This BDFL meant “Benevolent Dictator For Life”. It’s how the Drupal works currently, with that BDFL being founder of the project Dries Buytaert, whose own company Acquia recently announced that even though 8 wasn’t released and would be “ready when it’s ready”, they were ready to support customers who wanted to use Drupal 8. I guess this means they would value some kind of beta-to-beta upgrade path.
Grow the island communities
From the perspective of being one of the people who supports that upgrade path whilst also being asked every five milliseconds “When is Drupal 8 going to be ready?” I can imagine it’s probably quite stressful. Acquia aren’t the only ones of course, from a value perspective it means more adoption, certainly an easier life for me as I now partake in Brighton’s Homebrew Website Club to help keep the ball rolling on my migration of my own purkiss.com site to Drupal 8, although now I’ve thought of a few more pet projects I’d like to get up and running now I can actually base my efforts on the solid, well-thought-out foundation Drupal 8 provides me with.
Whatever the case, I leave my peers up to discuss and my readers to join in appropriately if they want. All I know is these decisions could be influenced by me if I wanted as it’s a Free Software project and if I cared enough about a certain topic I could get involved however I fit best and change it, not enough people understand or make use of those freedoms. Whilst Drupal is the largest community of contributors and over 3,000 people have commit mentions in Drupal 8, that’s a tiny proportion of those who use it, many whom make and create a lot of value and some of whom make a shed-ton of money out of it. Of course many more than just commit mentions make the community what it is, however the adoption rate at which Drupal has been taking that percentage is getting smaller every day.
An enormous amount of money comes back into the community in one way or another, but we are quite a way away from being able to simply visualise a piece of software in our minds and it suddenly spring up into existence in front of us without any human expense of effort. We may be able to one day do that - especially if we continue to freely innovate - but for the moment we have what we have, and every little piece takes human resources; at least until we replace them with running code.
As the Drupal project and community grows we need more people to be involved in building and supporting the very foundations which support us as a whole, and if that means rambling on in a lengthy, potentially edgy blog post in order to perhaps gain just one more person as a contributor then, until I am able to express myself in a better way, I’ll be doing that. I gained Daniel’s permission to blog about our discussions, I think it’s important to open up our processes deeply so people can see where they can potentially help out and become part of the thing we commonly refer to as Drupal.
As for the BDFL topic, I think it has obviously shown to work out well so far for Drupal, as for whether it’s a long-term solution well that’s also obvious to humans ;) Seriously though, I have no issues with the current situation until something proves me otherwise, I still believe we have a way to go before we are able to dissolve the fine leadership Dries provides to the community he has successfully fostered for the last fifteen-or-so years now.
Dries always seems open to discussion and is the most patient person I’ve ever met, certainly holds a role I would stress out in five minutes doing. I don’t see it working any differently for the moment at least - perhaps it would take a fork to even prove something like that. Forks are a Good Thing as they show in the long run what works and what doesn’t, providing the ultimate freedom of expression in an interdependent community such as Drupal.
Community ahoy!
As Daniel and I furthered discussion, he said something which resonated so much with me my virtual self almost shocked itself to spring into eternal existence. Sadly it didn’t, but it now has this quote emblazoned in its tiny, tiny virtual mind: “We should sell the community not the CMS.”
As an independent consultant who sometimes still writes code for certain things (only 8 commits in Drupal 8 so far though!) but works with people far better than himself in the community to deliver world-class software it’s something I’ve been doing but had not heard it in this simple, switch around way before. I invest in visiting the community and see what wonderful things they are building and his words to me, meant when you sell the CMS, you sell a product. There’s expectations put on that product often not knowing how those expectations will pan out. When you sell a community, you focus on promoting the people in that community, and as a Free Software community, provided you join in in some way, you too can benefit from the output.
Selling Freedom
Let’s just get the issues with the notion of selling Free Software - and people - out of the way. I’m not saying ‘Selling out’, just ‘selling’. Making a sale is an exchange of value between two or more parties, for example “you’ve sold it to me, I’ll use Drupal for my voluntary community project web enabled systems, thank you kindly!”.
It’s been working for me ever since I made the decision last year to not work through agencies after having to deal with yet another bad implementation of a CMS. Drupal is far greater than this, and so is my life. Since then I’ve had nothing but win/win/win results and although my cashflow has taken a dive as longer projects take time to bear fruit, it’s temporary one I'm almost out of and I’m kinda enjoying hacking on some bad code to pay the rent but even there I believe I’ve managed to turn the situation around and have an interesting offline mobile project in the pipeline. Along with the great work we’re doing with CRM (topic for another post!), it’s all about working together and supporting each other, and you don’t get that from talking about Drupal as a CMS.
As Simon Sinek says, start with the “Why?”.
As for did you miss the boat with Drupal 8? Not if you start now. Don’t wait for Drupal 8, in fact don’t use Drupal. Be part of it. Trust the community of peers and do what you can to help the project move along, and if you don’t know what that is then that is most likely a good place to start looking.
Is it that time already?
I didn’t imagine for a minute it would take this long to just describe day zero but I believe it’s of value, please do leave your thoughts in the comments below. In the next part I will move onto the workshops of the week, i.e. the ones I went to ;) This will cover why Drupal 8 Rules Configuration Management and Data Storage, manages client expectations with Behat, and why sometimes hospitals may seem a good prospect, but only if there’s air conditioning!
Oh, and a boat party and an outside grill with live music. It's not all serious talk on the shores of Lake Balaton you know ;)