Is Drupal the right tool for drupal.org and the project itself?
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UPDATE #2
On August 16th 2018, The Drupal Association on Twitter: "We're pleased to be announcing our plans to migrate our developer tools to GitLab", read twit or read the full announcement on drupal.org.
UPDATE #1
On October 18th 2016, The Drupal Association officially announced the creation of a Technical Advisory Committee: "the TAC is exploring opportunities to improve the tools we use to collaborate on Drupal.org. The crux of this exploration is determining whether we should continue to rely on and invest in our self-built tools, or whether we should partner with an organization that specializes in open source tooling."
ORIGINAL POST
I fell in love with Drupal on 2007, those were times of Drupal 4.7.x... ages ago in terms of technology! Back then, web communication tools were as limited as computing power and Internet bandwidth. Hopefully, we now live in a world radically different, with less limitations and more globally connected. Unfortunately for Drupal.org, things have not changed as fast and the reason is Drupal as software itself.
What is Drupal.org and why we need it?
(Source: http://www.thelandcruiser.com/)
Drupal.org is the house and the workplace of the Drupal software project and community. We need Drupal.org to connect the Drupal universe: the software project and the community.
Actually, this is what the Drupal.org roadmap says about itself:
"Drupal is one of the largest open source communities in the world. Each year Drupal.org and its sub-sites serve millions of visitors, and thousands of active contributors. It is one of the largest continuously operating Drupal sites in the world. And because of that, it has 15 years of legacy content and features. At this scale, it's impossible to make real improvements to Drupal.org without a prioritized roadmap, focusing on a few, high impact features at a time."
The tools we need vs. the tools we have
On 2007 we had not much services to pick from, for every need of the project, we had to build in-house solutions and maintain them. Nowadays things are the reverse, look this:
| Requirement | Current tool | Alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Version control and source code repository | Custom tool: http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupal | Specialized service (i.e: GitLab, GitHub) |
| Issue tracking system | Custom tool: https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupal | Specialized service (i.e: GitLab, JIRA, GitHub) |
| Communication channels for support | Archaic / custom tools: IRC, Drupal forums | Specialized service (i.e: Mattermost, slack, gitter) |
| Community communication channels | https://groups.drupal.org (g.d.o) | Social networks: (i.e: Mattermost, stackoverflow) |
| Documentation | Custom tools: https://api.drupal.org (a.d.o) and Drupal handbook | Specialized service (i.e: MediaWiki, GitBooks, GitHub wikis) |
| Testing | Custom tool: Drupal CI bot | Specialized service (i.e: Jenkins, Travis CI, Snap) |
| Localization | Custom tool: https://localize.drupal.org/ (l.d.o) | Specialized service (i.e: Pootle, Transifex, POEditor) |
| Landing page | Drupal (yay!) | No way! |
The cost of running Drupal.org
(Click picture for full-size)
According to the official 2014 Leadership Plan and Budget, the Drupal Association spent US$ 1.4 million on Drupal.org alone on 2014, representing 23.3% of expenses (6 million). Now make numbers yourself and realize if all that money would be spent better if we could migrate most of drupal.org from custom in-house stuff to efficient dedicated services.
The promise of Drupal vs. the reality
The first thing you read when looking for 'drupal' in google is:
"Drupal is an open source platform for building amazing digital experiences. It's made by a dedicated community"
Are we making Drupal.org an amazing digital experience for our dedicated community and visitors? You tell me...
Back to the original question: Is Drupal the right tool for drupal.org and the project itself?
I'm lurking for answers!
-- @develcuy
Drupal is a Free/Libre Open Source Software project, it is important that any core supporting services are also using similar. Recently Service As A Software Substitutes such as Slack have gained popularity however using these means people have to sign up to a proprietary service, we lose valuable history, and only have access to limited functionality and lose much data.
If Drupal is to continue to be a Free/Libre Open Source Software project then we must look to use Free/Libre Open Source Software alternatives to services such as these, for example Mattermost.
Drupal is not just the code but the community and communications which surround it, just because there's been a severe lack of investment in internal tools due to exploitation of supporting services doesn't mean we all have to give up & go home on the freedom front - Drupal is a highly important communication tool for everyone in the world to use and IMHO has a responsibility to continue that promise.
First of all welcome to steemit and thanks for your feedback! I agree regarding Freedom and gonna take a look to Mattermost. Guess you agree that Drupal is not the solution for everything, for sure there are other alternatives for the rest of drupal.org requirements.
Regarding the community, we are talking about people with lots of different ideas, yet we are exposed to an evolving web, so people moves at their own convenience. If we keep Drupal.org providing a poor experience, then people will keep leaving. Of course they have freedom to just go but the bill for the project will be pretty expensive...
-- @develcuy
I personally never got into Drupal. I have built a lot of websites on Wordpress.
by Jaypan at https://www.drupal.org/node/2810205#comment-11684065
How about this: "The promise of Drupal vs. the reality", is it good marketing?
-- @develcuy
To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:
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