Why not Drupal?
Recently, I encountered some problems when developing a project on Drupal 7 (when switching to Drupal 7), but this is not about them. Looking for solutions, I came across an article " The Drupal Crisis ", one of the Drupal developers - Daniel F. Kudwien , who shed light on what is happening in the Drupal forge. I must say that most of the problems described in the article are no longer relevant, since last year's article. Nevertheless, many will be interested to get acquainted with its translation.
Chronology of events
The following table provides an entertaining chronology of events that can be viewed as starting points for the onset of the Drupal crisis.
| 2008 | February | Drupal 7 is open to development. |
| October | 285 uncorrected bugs. | |
| 2009 | March | Acquia 1 calls the developer community for help. |
| June | 3120 uncorrected bugs out of 13763 | |
| September | A code freeze is scheduled. At the same time, 10 new features are still being developed from scratch and their implementation is allowed in Drupal 7 | |
| 2010 | January | The first alpha version of Drupal 7 is released with a bunch of critical bugs in the new API. But even more bugs in those new features. |
| July | The error flow is too large (as we all know, one fixed bug often tends to generate several new ones), the developers fail. Team spirit and sense of purpose is lost. In order to somehow get rid of all this “porridge” a new priority is introduced for bugs - “major” (important). I can't even imagine what the hell was going on in their bugtracker. | |
| October | First beta version of Drupal 7 released | |
| 2011 | January | Drupal 7 is released with more than 300 uncorrected major bugs and a non-working update mechanism. |
| May | In order to stabilize the situation, another maintainer 2 is hired to accompany Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, which is also working on the core. Drupal has a bug fix policy under development by Drupal 8 and then releasing backporting fixes for Durupal 7 and 6. | |
| June | More than 200 critical and major bugs change the status to normal. | |
| July | New numbers : 15 critical and 200 important bugs in the Drupal 8 branch make backporting difficult. | |
| August | 4153 unrepaired bugs out of a total of 22181, which almost doubled in two years, almost stops the development of the Drupal 8 branch. The order of updating Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 is still unclear to many users. |
As you can see the events unfortunate. Only in new projects: Dashboard, Shortcut, Toolbar and Overlay more than 150 uncorrected bugs and tasks. These modules were developed from scratch after freezing the code, then they were rewritten at least once after implementation, which greatly affected the delayed release of Drupal 7.
For 2012, the situation with 7koy seems to have improved. In the planned release of the 8-ki, everything related to the kernel will now be moved to the core folder.
Analysis of the situation
“I believe that the initial appeal of the Drupal community to help demotivate a key group: kernel developers able to cope with the most difficult tasks ...
We now have about 450+ kernel developers, of which about 10 work on the interface. ”
© this remark was once made by one of the leaders of the team responsible for usability.
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In other words: “the kernel developers didn’t really want to take on the load, but it was all the same”. These new features not only delayed the release of Drupal 7, but also distracted kernel developers from working on the more important issues of the Drupal API and subsystems. Many of these problems have not yet been resolved. Above it was considered that it would be nice to implement this functionality. So what if it is raw ?! Put it in the core - let the community support it.
New subsystems of Drupal 7 are very complex and strongly interconnected with other equally complex subsystems. Because of this (high threshold of entry) novices can not be included in the process of fixing bugs. It is the prerogative of experienced developers of kernel and modules who deeply understand the consequences of changing these subsystems. It's not entirely clear what the Acquia management thought when calling for help from the community. Cry from the heart?
Without a doubt: the free contribution to the development and the interests of commercial enterprises are generally incompatible, which in many cases strongly inhibits development and even destructive. Drupal is an example. Unfortunately, the contribution to the kernel code of some of the most active and experienced developers who have settled in the company over the past 3 years has suddenly dropped to almost zero. Conflict of interest on the face. Apparently, it’s not the fate of Acquia to become for Drupal what Red Hat was for Linux.
What we have?
In addition to the above-mentioned shortcomings and new features, the Drupal core is still dragging a bunch of very old and unnecessary trash (sarcasm-field: giving MVC ?!) based on the API and concepts allowed in Drupal 5 years ago before.
The core of Drupal is blocking its own upgrades and innovations, and in recent years has already begun to lag far behind its competitors and the industry as a whole. This is a monolithic, stupidly old and sick beast.
Too much software trash. And there are too many unfinished, not supported by anyone features.
The Drupal core is no longer supported. Do you still believe in the beautiful Acquia tales of the LTS editions for those who do not want to chase the version numbers ?!
Drupal path. Is there a way out?
Daniel F. Kudwien in his next article, " Drupal Crisis Conclusion, " offers several ways to take control of Drupal development. But the dynamic is such that over the past 2 years, 8000+ new bugs have been posted.
Each of them should be:
- created
- analyzed
- fixed
- reviewed by an expert
- tested
- approved
- and finally added to the code
On average, this means that 320 bugs per month or 10 bugs per day must pass through this process. It is not difficult to calculate that it will take more than 2 years to clear it all up. Moreover, further these numbers will only grow , because as parts of the core change and various kinds of inconsistencies subsystems emerge. The rapid pace observed today.
As the developers themselves admit, we ourselves do not know which parts of Drupal are actually considered to be the core, and Acquia already does not know what to actively support in the core.
Developers have almost no desire to help support this disaster from unfinished modules. Now a bunch of unimportant things distracts developers from the categorically necessary refactoring, aimed at combating real, terrible punctures in the design of the kernel.
Conclusion (from me)
Everyone is interested in the question, what is waiting for Drupal in the future?
Perhaps Drupal 8 is tightly bogged down with its problems, and in order to pull it out, Acquia will have to rely even more on its strength, and even less on the community. Many rethink the use of Drupal in their business.
It is even possible that with the release of new versions of Drupal 7 and the Drupal 8 branch, the product will come to its illogical conclusion. In the sense that the concept of Drupal 8 has been changed so much that it will be a completely different new product and a new story.
Why illogical? Many products remain the best for several years, work well and delight those who use them. But not the developers themselves, who reached the limit of perfection, “sucked” everything out of the project and were afraid to spoil it. And, staying in one place is not an option, because there is no development, logic, progress ... whatever you want. Sometimes such projects are frozen in order to start working on something new, more revolutionary. Of course, forks may form and the product will not lose its relevance for a long time. There is no need to go far for examples: the wonderful CMF CodeIgniter from which Kohana was formed.
At the moment, I think that Drupal 6 is the peak of Drupal development. Stable and well-established product, one of the best of its kind. Further, the development of this beautiful CMS goes into another direction : Drupal is no longer a product of the community, and more and more becomes the product of a corporation (in a sense, repeating the fate of Linux).
In Russia, a huge community of Drupal developers has gathered, gathering annually at such conferences as: DrupalConf, DrupalForum, DrupalCamp, etc.
Now, they will protect Drupal and this is true, because the best tool is the one you own best. But they are already unhappy. Look through comments for example, here .
I would like to tell the newcomers who are faced with the choice to think once again which CMS / CMF to use as the main tool. Moreover, the vector has definitely shifted towards the use of web frameworks.
For myself, I have already drawn conclusions ... the main thing in time is to give up what pulls you down.
And finally, I will say that the author, who was expecting a lot of negative emotions, disagreements and abuse from the post of " The Drupal Crisis ", to his surprise found that almost everyone who responded to the post, generally agreed with the voiced problems.
Meanwhile, Rockettheme 3 says goodbye to Drupal ( original ).
Primary Sources and Other Materials
- Daniel F. Kudwien "The Drupal Crisis"
Original:
http://www.unleashedmind.com/en/blog/sun/the-drupal-crisis
Translation of Roman Grachev (http://graker.ru):
http://graker.ru/news/2011/08/25/khvatit_krasit_guby_ogromnoi_svine - Daniel F. Kudwien "Drupal Crisis Conclusion"
Original:
http://www.unleashedmind.com/en/blog/sun/crisis-conclusions
Translation of Roman Grachev (http://graker.ru):
http://graker.ru/news/2011/08/26/kak_smyt_makiyazh_so_svini_ili_vykhod_iz_krizisa - Drupal's foggy future
http://www.drupal.ru/node/65464?page=1 - Why I do not like Drupal
http://habrahabr.ru/post/44980/
Footnotes
- Acquia is a company created by Drupal developer Dris Beuert.
- Maintainer - the person accompanying the software product takes part in the development and bugfixes.
- RocketTheme - the leading studio for the production of paid templates for Joomla. Also produces templates for other CMS.
Founded by Andy Miller, co-founder of Joomla.
Miller worked on CMS Mambo and early versions of Joomla as the main developer.
RocketTheme templates use the Gantry Framework , which is also their development.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/149590/
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