Drupal Gets Non-Profit Backing

DrupalAssociation writes "Drupal, the popular and widely used CMS, now has the backing of a non-profit association. Having grown in size and scope for the last six years, the Drupal software project needs more structured support with infrastructure, marketing and funding. The Drupal Association will help with these needs but will not be directly involved with Drupal software development. Donations are now being solicited. Plans for Corporate and individual membership are being drawn and will be announced at a later time. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and the President of the Association, announced the Association on Drupal.org today."

Which CMS would this be now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only are there a dozen things labeled "CMS", even the ones that are supposedly the same (such as Code Management Systems) disagree on what a CMS really is or does.

I just steer away from that sort of thing on principle....

Re:huh?

[DrupalAssociation]

Right. It will go to support the infrastructure of Drupal.org (and related sites, like http://groups.drupal.org/ [drupal.org] events, marketing and infrastructure. The Association may also sponsor Drupal related development (to improve the release system, or make a new Drupal.org theme, for example), but the Association is *not* involved in the development of the Drupal software. This is an important distinction and is legally binding. What it means is that the Association Board of Directors won't be voting on which features make Drupal core, or whether we should support Sybase but not Oracle etc...

Re:huh?

[DrupalAssociation]

Actually, building out Drupal.org infrastructure and and organizing conferences (as in, renting rooms) are higher priority items than paying for individuals' travel. But as of yet, no purchasing decisions have been made, so the current Board of Directors has no track record spending money.

Re:This is what Drupal looks like

[truthsearch]

That's not part of the platform. That's some random theme you picked. There are themes written well and themes not written well. Dries and others are extremely picky with the code allowed into the drupal core.

I have intimate knowledge of the drupal code and can easily say the parent is not at all informative. Drupal modules and core have no code that looks anything like this.

Re:Do you really want to Drupal ?

[truthsearch]

I've been using Drupal for years and could not disagree more. I was on the developer's mailing list for a long time helping out people new to the code. I contributed a few modules. I stuck with Drupal after trying many many other options. None were better written (for PHP). Most other projects do not pay as much attention to the platform aspect of their software. And most other systems aren't as easy or flexible enough to add modules.

BTW, if a module you like isn't supported in 4.7, keep on using 4.6. There's usually no reason at all to upgrade your Drupal installation unless there are completely new features you need.

Re:Domain Should be Owned by the Group

[GrouchoMarx]

As a Drupal developer for the past year and a half, I can't disagree more. Yes, Dries disagrees with major contributors often, and has shot down my ideas at times too, but on the whole the high standards that he (and the other committers and core contributors, of whom there are many) holds to have kept the system moving in the right direction. How many open source systems out there do have full coverage test suites for everything? A minority, I wager.

And of course Drupal's very architecture, hyper-modular like Eclipse and even more plugin-based than OSS darling Firefox, encourages pushing functionality out to contrib modules where it can be developed more rapidly and without weighing down the core system with extra code (read: extra bugs).

I don't know what the plans are as far as trademark and domain name ownership long term, as I'm not involved with the Association directly. I agree that it would be a good place for such things, but it was only just founded. Give it time to sort out the legal details. I know a few of the other people who are on the Association's board of directors, and I know they are not short-sighted people.

Drupal development

[UnConeD]

What bizarro world do you live in?

Yes, Drupal maintains high code standards, which are frequently a reason not to commit patches. All these practices, as well as detailed guidelines in terms of security, API usage, theming, localization, ... are published on the web site. Dries himself frequently runs benchmarks on Drupal and identifies areas where a patch can be improved. The community also polices itself when it comes to contributed modules, and tries to avoid overlap between them.

Besides Dries, there are 4 other people with core commit access (including me). Two of those were added about a year ago, matching our increased growth. They are respected community members who have demonstrated fair and balanced judgement and excellent technical skills. We all maintain the same standards, and give each patch a fair review. For the Drupal 5.0 release, almost 500 people submitted patches. Several of those affected key parts of Drupal's core. Many of those have been and are still being developed as contributed modules that are slowly seeping into core. For example, Drupal 5 includes user-definable content types, which was incorporated from CCK.module.

When a patch is rejected, there is always a good reason given. Most people however forget that Drupal is used and deployed in a variety of scenarios, and that what goes for them doesn't necessary apply to others. This is why we try to make sure that as many parts of Drupal can be altered, extended or removed by modules, so that nobody needs to create a fork (which causes update/maintenance hassles).

Re:This is what Drupal looks like

[dscruggs]

I've been using it for 18 months and never work with code like that. That's simple template code, more suitable for dabblers and graphic designers. Drupal actually has multiple template rendering engines that allow you to make a page look like whatever you want. Here are a few examples:

http://www.yourmtb.com/ [yourmtb.com]
http://www.yourclimbing.com/ [yourclimbing.com]
http://www.theonion.com/ [theonion.com]
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ [spreadfirefox.com] (yes, really)