If you've been involved with Drupal for any length of time, you have most likely used the features provided by the Project Suite (project, project_issue, project_release, etc.) on drupal.org, which provide community-critical features such as:

• Issue tracking
• Issue e-mail notifications
• Release management
• Release packaging/downloads
• Project usage tracking
• Project searching

Without the functionality provided by this suite of modules, it would be much harder for the Drupal community to get its work done, and to distribute the fruits of that labor for others to use.

However, if drupal.org is "probably the oldest continuously-running Drupal site"[1], then the Project Suite is one of the oldest code bases in Drupal outside of core. Although it was originally authored and maintained by Kjartan Mannes, it went through a multi-year period where it was maintained by a variety of contributors, each doing a small part to keep it functioning on drupal.org as Drupal matured. Unfortunately, this led to a 'just make it work' approach to site upgrades and new features.

In recent years, thanks to the efforts of dww, hunmonk, mikey_p, bdragon, and others, the suite has been significantly rehabilitated, making it both more maintainable for drupal.org and more generally usable. However, many warts and design flaws still remain.

The release of Drupal 7 offers a unique opportunity for the future of the Project Suite. Many of Drupal 7's new features enable building this kind of functionality much easier. We maintainers intend to redesign the suite from the ground up using Drupal 7, and then provide a data migration path from the D6 database schema. This is a big job, but frankly, so is updating the Project Suite from one version of Drupal to another. We're inspired by the approach and success of Drupal Commerce in doing a similar effort with the wisdom they gained from working on Ubercart, so we're hoping to accomplish something similar in this problem space. Instead of focusing on just building a product, we want to build a good framework that different products can be built on top of (including a product that can be a drop-in replacement for the D6 version of the Project Suite).

To that end, we've organized a Project Suite D7 Redesign Sprint for October 24th and 25th, the Monday and Tuesday following BADCamp. The goal of this sprint is straighforward: develop a plan to rebuild the current functionality provided by the Project Suite using Drupal 7, making it both more maintainable by the community, and more usable as a project management tool. The module co-maintainers will both be present for the sprint, and other interested parties are invited to attend (both in person or remotely via IRC (#drupal-project on freenode) and the issue queues).

We're still locking down the logistics for the sprint itself, including the venue. It depends on how many people are going to physically participate vs. people who want to contribute remotely. Although we'll probably be talking about this all weekend at BADCamp and might start earlier, the formal sprint will be approximately 9am-9pm on Monday, and 9am-6pm on Tuesday. Please leave a comment here on this post with your intentions of joining the sprint so we can make final arrangements. Be sure to clearly specify if you'll be here in person or not, which days/times you're available, etc. I'll privately e-mail everyone who wants to come with the final location so you don't necessarily have to worry about checking back for updates about the details.

After the sprint we'll publish a follow-up post with more information on the plan, and how others in the community can help with the job of the actual rewrite. To get the process started, I just updated the issue summary at [meta] Port Project to Drupal 7 so interested parties can follow (not subscribe!) to that. ;)

We're looking forward to seeing many of you here in the beautiful East Bay this weekend for BADCamp, and we hope some of you can stay and join us for this sprint!

Thanks,
-Derek and Chad