Drupal 8 Development Retrospective. A timeline and retrospective from a core contributor

Transcription

1 Drupal 8 Development Retrospective A timeline and retrospective from a core contributor

2 Drupal 7, Gates & Initiatives DrupalCon Chicago 2011, Drupal 8 development starts immediately. Dries discusses gates and initiatives to lead Drupal 8 development to improve quality and release management. Initiatives include: Web Services, HTML5, UUID, and CMI Followed by Multilingual, Scotch and Spark.

3 PostgreSQL had critical bugs in 2010 during Drupal 7 RC1. Promised myself to be involved earlier in Drupal 8 development. Woo! Drupal 7 is released, let s go build some sites! Entity API Organic Groups Views

4 Symfony2 Adopted and Code Freeze Announced DrupalCon Denver 2012: Symfony2 adopted. DrupalCon Munich 2012: Code Slush and Code Freeze announced. Moshe presents Migrate as an alternative to Upgrade Path at core conversation.

5 Began learning about Drupal 8. Worked with Web Services initiative to bring Serializer and serialization module into Drupal 8. Skeptical of Moshe s Migrate proposal. Took code freeze seriously: Began porting contributed modules. Began PostgreSQL bug fixes.

6 Migrate adopted, Backdrop announced Migrate is adopted as a new initiative. Plugin API is rewritten again. Some grow frustrated at the new OOP architecture. Backdrop announced as alternative to compete in the smaller markets. Start dropping features from Drupal 8.

7 Became a mentor at DrupalCon Portland PostgreSQL driver development Blocked on a single issue for 9 months.

8 Plugin, Performance, and Testing Plugin API refactored again. Configuration returns to database, but CMI still utilizes YAML for import/export. DrupalCI initiative kicks into gear to improve drupal.org testing infrastructure. Backdrop 1.0 release.

9 Made my pitch for PostgreSQL at DrupalCon Amsterdam Joined up with DrupalCI Initiative as a way to be able to test patches in PostgreSQL instead of upload & pray.

10 Drupal 8 Final Development Push PHP version requirement increment Update to newer Symfony 2 and other dependencies. Good Code initiative started to utilize PHP features such as assert Release Candidate 1 Backdrop 1.1 released.

11 Fixed PostgreSQL driver with bzrudi71, stefan_r, and daffie using an external drupalci test bot. DrupalCI initiative goes live on drupal.org. My contributed modules lag behind for Drupal 7 maintenance because I m too focused on Drupal 8 development.

12 Retrospective Initiatives: Were they successful? Discussion as to whether leads felt empowered or not. WSCII went well, but Crell felt like he could not make decisions. Multilingual went well and Gabor felt like he could and did make decisions. Clearer guidelines established and make it easier for feature development to be worked on in parallel to bug fixes.

13 Retrospective Symfony 2 Adoption: Was it worth it? There was too much in Drupal to change. And work is not complete. We need to focus on continuing to improve code quality as we shift to a more modern architecture.

14 Retrospective Symfony 2 Adoption: Was it worth it? There was too much in Drupal to change. And work is not complete. We need to focus on continuing to improve code quality as we shift to a more modern architecture.

15 Retrospective Code freeze announcement was meaningless in Could we have done a better job at sticking to dates? Or was Drupal 8 ready when it was ready? Scale back the feature creep with minor version updates in development of Drupal 8.x.0 and Drupal 9.y.0.

16 Retrospective Anyone remember small core? Providing a great CMS out-of-the-box for people to create and build web sites is the goal. Josh Koenig: But is the iron price of Drupal too high for simple web sites? Me: We must focus on reducing the burden of site maintenance and improve education for making Drupal more accessible for people who want to build a site, not a blog.

17 Retrospective PostgreSQL SQL Server driver still exists in contrib and is able to influence core, but not enough to block release candidate. JSON Field module exists to leverage PostgreSQL native JSON. We now have testing infrastructure and system that can test any database driver with docker containers. Still things to improve about the driver, sacrifices made.

18 Retrospective Composer Will be a nightmare for site builders or those who are not familiar with development practices. Moving Drupal (and eventually contrib) to use semantic versioning.

19 Retrospective Migrate I was correct. We face the same problems in Upgrade Path as we do Migrate out in the wild. But Migrate does a better job and is flexible to handle many different upgrade situations. It works fairly well.

20 Retrospective I am excited to build Drupal 8 web sites leveraging modern PHP and JavaScript dependencies. PostgreSQL 9.4 is amazing and I want to leverage it to store entities objects in JSON with Serializer. Configuration Management is going to rock. WOOOOOO LET S BUILD SOME DRUPAL 8 SITES! Wait, this seems like deja vu