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As a counter-point: I've found it impossible to penetrate the Drupal community. I have filed several tickets over the years, including patches, which have often

As a counter-point: I've found it impossible to penetrate the Drupal community. I have filed several tickets over the years, including patches, which have often gone entirely without comment for sometimes months. Including a bug report and patch against a core include file. IRC is sometimes helpful, but usually not. In my experience, it's just really hard to get any questions answered or bugs fixed in Drupal.

snowwrestler 11y ago
How recently was that? They made a big public effort during the Drupal 8 project to become more open, welcoming, and responsive, and it would interesting to know if that made a difference.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  My most recent interaction with the Drupal community was today. I finally got a response on a couple of patches I submitted a few weeks ago (one committed, one got useful feedback, which is great!), and I followed up on a patch that I'd contributed that someone else used and found to resolve their problem (but still has no response from the maintainer, after a few weeks), and checked on that core include patch, which has no reply, even though I submitted a patch against D8 in hopes of getting a reply (I figured maybe all the core people were bored of Drupal 6 and Drupal 7). So, no. The recent push hasn't changed much in my experience. It could just be bad luck, and my own inability to spend more time on the problem of introducing myself or being involved. Drupal will never be my core job or something I can spend significant time on. But, I've never had such a hard time getting feedback on patches before, with any still active project I can think of, and I've been submitting little patches and making bug reports against OSS projects for a long time. If Drupal has a welcoming and helpful community I've had trouble finding where they hang out. It is definitely not in their issue tracker.
  - chx 11y ago
    I am sorry. The issue tracker is a really vast place and it is indeed not the best place to start. I would recommend https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours for example. However: right now is perhaps not the best time, we just had Drupal 8 out and everyone is resting. And there's Thanksgiving and then Christmas upcoming. I am in #drupal-migrate on freenode, however , very very often and looking for contributors to that effort :) #drupal-contribute is a good place too, it might look quiet now but try saying the magic words "I am new here and I'd like to contribute". Sooner or later (again, it's thanksgiving weekend) those words will conjure a welcoming guide :)
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      Thanks for the pointers. I think this may be where part of the breakdown comes in. I don't want to be a "Drupal developer", don't want to devote huge amounts of time to the project (though I may release a couple of modules of the stuff I develop for my own use at some point), and don't necessarily want a guide (though someone that answers my questions about the incredibly complex abstractions in Drupal would certainly be helpful, I don't believe I'm entitled to such). I want to fix bugs and add missing functionality that prevent me from launching my site, send the patches to fix those bugs to the people who maintain the component or module, and then move on to the next problem in my deployment. When I send those patches in, it's because I hope to never have to deal with the problem again. I've been casually poking my head into Drupal every now and then for years. I'd almost be willing to say the problem of casual contribution is worse than it was, say, 7 years ago. That sort of casual contribution has rarely been an issue in the past with other projects; I've got patches in dozens, maybe hundreds, of OSS projects at this point. I don't mean to overvalue it and say this is priceless knowledge I'm imparting. Often it's just a couple of lines of code or a documentation correction, but each one adds up to a slightly better project. And, it's kinda how this stuff is supposed to work. Enough eyes makes all bugs shallow, that kind of thing. If I have to maintain a custom fork of several modules, and a piece of core, just to keep my site going, my experience becomes drastically less pleasant, and my reasons for using Drupal become less compelling. Much of the automation I have in place for staying on top of updates and such breaks down at that point. I'm sounding grumpier about it than I actually am, probably, as I don't begrudge anyone not doing something for free. I'm happy to have all of these components that mostly work well together, and do useful stuff, for free. And, I'm willing to put in the work to make it suit my needs. But, when I see the suggestion that it's an excellent example of a helpful community, I have to take exception, as it's definitely not been my experience. Drupal forums and ticket tracker responses can be downright dismissive, at times, particularly when someone is coming from another system or framework and doesn't understand the Drupal jargon (which is vast, confusing, and often weird).
hunvreus 11y ago
I initially liked my experience with the Drupal community. One of the things that drove me away (5+ years ago), beyond the direction the project took around Drupal 6 [1], was being stuck on Drupal.org for development. In 2009, GitHub already offered everything the community would need, but instead developers were stuck with (poorly) custom made solutions. Last time I checked, it was still the case. [1]: http://teddy.fr/2013/01/25/dropping-the-drop/ http://teddy.fr/2013/01/25/dropping-the-drop/
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I have always had a mixed experience, and I think I mostly agree with that blog post, for the most part. I know our most recent migration to Drupal 7 (still ongoing, about a year after I started working on it in my spare time; it's the most painful migration I've ever worked on, including migrations across CMS and languages...this particular site has been migrated from OpenACS->Joomla->Drupal 6, all of those jumps were faster and easier than the jump to Drupal 7). I'm very uncomfortable with the direction of Drupal (the willingness to break backward compatibility without credible paths forward for users being the most painful for me). I've always assumed mostly it's due to my own ignorance, but this blog post confirms some of that discomfort is not just me not knowing what's going on. There's been a big move of putting things into the database that once resided in code, and this makes it really challenging to figure out how anything works. The abstraction runs really, really, deep, almost absurdly so. Trying to figure out what makes a page happen is an exercise in frustration a lot of the time, as it has pieces that are in code, pieces that are in Views, and pieces that come from other mysterious locations (there's stuff that I just assume will always remain beyond my kin). Drupal 8 seems to be further down that path. Certainly there are improvements, but it just requires so much knowledge to even begin to work on anything in Drupal that it's incredibly frustrating for someone that dips in every week or so, to add new functionality or fix a bug on my company website. Earlier in this migration, and at several stages along the way, I've assessed whether I could move our site to something else with less effort and end up with something nicer (both for users and to maintain). I opted not to at several points along the path, but I'm still not convinced that was a wise choice, even as close as I am now to launching a D7 version. Frankly, I dread working on the damned thing. It's just not fun. As for github, I don't actually blame an OSS project for not wanting to move into a proprietary source hosting platform. I have uneasy feelings about my own projects being hosted there, and plan to work on a gitlab or Phabricator or something else deployment eventually, so we are not beholden to a proprietary third party (github is a great product and they seem like great people, but so was SourceForge at one time). Anyway, if there were some other thing (I don't like using the term CMS, because people often assume I'm wanting a CMS...when "content management" is effectively 0% of my use case for Drupal) that had integrated forums, ticket tracker, shopping cart with subscriptions and licensing, and a way to manage docs, and it didn't require mountains of custom code, I would have already moved away from Drupal. I've considered building something custom with a framework, but this isn't my core competency or interest; I just want to put some pieces together and sell and support the software I do want to work on full-time.

snowwrestler 11y ago

How recently was that? They made a big public effort during the Drupal 8 project to become more open, welcoming, and responsive, and it would interesting to know if that made a difference.

SwellJoe 11y ago
My most recent interaction with the Drupal community was today. I finally got a response on a couple of patches I submitted a few weeks ago (one committed, one got useful feedback, which is great!), and I followed up on a patch that I'd contributed that someone else used and found to resolve their problem (but still has no response from the maintainer, after a few weeks), and checked on that core include patch, which has no reply, even though I submitted a patch against D8 in hopes of getting a reply (I figured maybe all the core people were bored of Drupal 6 and Drupal 7). So, no. The recent push hasn't changed much in my experience. It could just be bad luck, and my own inability to spend more time on the problem of introducing myself or being involved. Drupal will never be my core job or something I can spend significant time on. But, I've never had such a hard time getting feedback on patches before, with any still active project I can think of, and I've been submitting little patches and making bug reports against OSS projects for a long time. If Drupal has a welcoming and helpful community I've had trouble finding where they hang out. It is definitely not in their issue tracker.
- chx 11y ago
  I am sorry. The issue tracker is a really vast place and it is indeed not the best place to start. I would recommend https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours for example. However: right now is perhaps not the best time, we just had Drupal 8 out and everyone is resting. And there's Thanksgiving and then Christmas upcoming. I am in #drupal-migrate on freenode, however , very very often and looking for contributors to that effort :) #drupal-contribute is a good place too, it might look quiet now but try saying the magic words "I am new here and I'd like to contribute". Sooner or later (again, it's thanksgiving weekend) those words will conjure a welcoming guide :)
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    Thanks for the pointers. I think this may be where part of the breakdown comes in. I don't want to be a "Drupal developer", don't want to devote huge amounts of time to the project (though I may release a couple of modules of the stuff I develop for my own use at some point), and don't necessarily want a guide (though someone that answers my questions about the incredibly complex abstractions in Drupal would certainly be helpful, I don't believe I'm entitled to such). I want to fix bugs and add missing functionality that prevent me from launching my site, send the patches to fix those bugs to the people who maintain the component or module, and then move on to the next problem in my deployment. When I send those patches in, it's because I hope to never have to deal with the problem again. I've been casually poking my head into Drupal every now and then for years. I'd almost be willing to say the problem of casual contribution is worse than it was, say, 7 years ago. That sort of casual contribution has rarely been an issue in the past with other projects; I've got patches in dozens, maybe hundreds, of OSS projects at this point. I don't mean to overvalue it and say this is priceless knowledge I'm imparting. Often it's just a couple of lines of code or a documentation correction, but each one adds up to a slightly better project. And, it's kinda how this stuff is supposed to work. Enough eyes makes all bugs shallow, that kind of thing. If I have to maintain a custom fork of several modules, and a piece of core, just to keep my site going, my experience becomes drastically less pleasant, and my reasons for using Drupal become less compelling. Much of the automation I have in place for staying on top of updates and such breaks down at that point. I'm sounding grumpier about it than I actually am, probably, as I don't begrudge anyone not doing something for free. I'm happy to have all of these components that mostly work well together, and do useful stuff, for free. And, I'm willing to put in the work to make it suit my needs. But, when I see the suggestion that it's an excellent example of a helpful community, I have to take exception, as it's definitely not been my experience. Drupal forums and ticket tracker responses can be downright dismissive, at times, particularly when someone is coming from another system or framework and doesn't understand the Drupal jargon (which is vast, confusing, and often weird).

hunvreus 11y ago

I initially liked my experience with the Drupal community. One of the things that drove me away (5+ years ago), beyond the direction the project took around Drupal 6 [1], was being stuck on Drupal.org for development. In 2009, GitHub already offered everything the community would need, but instead developers were stuck with (poorly) custom made solutions. Last time I checked, it was still the case. [1]: http://teddy.fr/2013/01/25/dropping-the-drop/ http://teddy.fr/2013/01/25/dropping-the-drop/

SwellJoe 11y ago
I have always had a mixed experience, and I think I mostly agree with that blog post, for the most part. I know our most recent migration to Drupal 7 (still ongoing, about a year after I started working on it in my spare time; it's the most painful migration I've ever worked on, including migrations across CMS and languages...this particular site has been migrated from OpenACS->Joomla->Drupal 6, all of those jumps were faster and easier than the jump to Drupal 7). I'm very uncomfortable with the direction of Drupal (the willingness to break backward compatibility without credible paths forward for users being the most painful for me). I've always assumed mostly it's due to my own ignorance, but this blog post confirms some of that discomfort is not just me not knowing what's going on. There's been a big move of putting things into the database that once resided in code, and this makes it really challenging to figure out how anything works. The abstraction runs really, really, deep, almost absurdly so. Trying to figure out what makes a page happen is an exercise in frustration a lot of the time, as it has pieces that are in code, pieces that are in Views, and pieces that come from other mysterious locations (there's stuff that I just assume will always remain beyond my kin). Drupal 8 seems to be further down that path. Certainly there are improvements, but it just requires so much knowledge to even begin to work on anything in Drupal that it's incredibly frustrating for someone that dips in every week or so, to add new functionality or fix a bug on my company website. Earlier in this migration, and at several stages along the way, I've assessed whether I could move our site to something else with less effort and end up with something nicer (both for users and to maintain). I opted not to at several points along the path, but I'm still not convinced that was a wise choice, even as close as I am now to launching a D7 version. Frankly, I dread working on the damned thing. It's just not fun. As for github, I don't actually blame an OSS project for not wanting to move into a proprietary source hosting platform. I have uneasy feelings about my own projects being hosted there, and plan to work on a gitlab or Phabricator or something else deployment eventually, so we are not beholden to a proprietary third party (github is a great product and they seem like great people, but so was SourceForge at one time). Anyway, if there were some other thing (I don't like using the term CMS, because people often assume I'm wanting a CMS...when "content management" is effectively 0% of my use case for Drupal) that had integrated forums, ticket tracker, shopping cart with subscriptions and licensing, and a way to manage docs, and it didn't require mountains of custom code, I would have already moved away from Drupal. I've considered building something custom with a framework, but this isn't my core competency or interest; I just want to put some pieces together and sell and support the software I do want to work on full-time.