The Turning Point For Drupal Core

Those who weren’t at Drupalcon, or aren’t involved in core development, may have heard rumours of big discussions about the project at Drupalcon London, but don’t worry — it’s good news. Issues that have been discussed for years have come to a head, gained consensus, and are becoming action. In this article I’ll attempt to give a much-simplified digest of events for those who haven’t been in the loop.

The current momentum started with a blog post ‘The Drupal Crisis’ by Daniel Kudwien (sun), backed by some of the other core developers. Among a number of points he made was one about Drupal core being too big, and too difficult to maintain. He suggested a focus on it as more of a framework, leaving the added functionality for particular use cases to Install Profiles or Distributions to deliver - including a new ‘standard’ distribution of Drupal that would include the current install profile.

His post helped focus some general frustrations from a number of people into a more unified and productive action list that could be discussed by the core developers gathered at Drupalcon. Even Sun was surprised by the level of support his post received, and he published a follow up with his conclusions.

Both posts, and the comments, are well worth reading for anyone interested in the future direction of the Drupal project.

One page that Sun posted to support his points was an example Drupal download page which would feature different ‘flavours’.

He also opened an issue in the Drupal Core issue queue titled ‘Make Core Maintainable’. This proposed removing a lot of modules from core. It’s around this that the discussion and effort began to focus.

Among the many comments, Dries responded with his views on what could be removed for Drupal 8, what needs to stay - but also what he feels should be added (things he’s already flagged as key initiatives for D8).

A group of core developers, including Dries, then gathered late at night in the conference hotel and discussed the ideas into the early hours of the morning.

And then, quicker than anyone had expected, patches were committed to the Drupal 8 branch removing modules such as Profile and Blog.

Larry Garfield (Crell), then called for a pause in removing more modules to allow for discussion of “a heuristic for what functionality belongs in core […] Then, we can go over core and see what that heuristic would say doesn’t belong (which may or may not map 1:1 to existing modules) and exterminate those bits that we agree don’t make the cut.” Sun agreed, as did Chx. That discussion is still going on.

Meanwhile, discussion and work also continued in parallel at the conference on Jeff Eaton’s Snowman Project, which aims to create a distribution of Drupal suitable for setting up basic sites out of the box. Having a distribution like this will be key to allowing core to be slimmed down and still providing a good end user experience.

All this meant that, for Drupal developers, Drupalcon London was an exciting week. It suggests that Drupal 8 is going to be a big release — with a lot of legacy modules moved out of core, while a lot of new functionality is brought in by the key Core Initiatives. It also means that there seems to be a growing consensus that core should be a leaner ‘framework’ with distributions providing the required features for certain end users.