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Drupal Gets Non-Profit Backing
DrupalAssociation writes "Drupal, the popular and widely used CMS, now has the backing of a non-profit association. Having grown in size and scope for the last six years, the Drupal software project needs more structured support with infrastructure, marketing and funding. The Drupal Association will help with these needs but will not be directly involved with Drupal software development. Donations are now being solicited. Plans for Corporate and individual membership are being drawn and will be announced at a later time. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and the President of the Association, announced the Association on Drupal.org today."
3) Profit!!!
Not only are there a dozen things labeled "CMS", even the ones that are supposedly the same (such as Code Management Systems) disagree on what a CMS really is or does.
I just steer away from that sort of thing on principle....
Right. It will go to support the infrastructure of Drupal.org (and related sites, like http://groups.drupal.org/ events, marketing and infrastructure. The Association may also sponsor Drupal related development (to improve the release system, or make a new Drupal.org theme, for example), but the Association is *not* involved in the development of the Drupal software. This is an important distinction and is legally binding. What it means is that the Association Board of Directors won't be voting on which features make Drupal core, or whether we should support Sybase but not Oracle etc...
From their FAQ:
Why does Dries, and not the Drupal Association, hold the domain name?
Dries has always retained access to the domain name, and has a proven track history of being responsible with its care. The Drupal Association as yet is unestablished, and would represent a great risk to place something so important to the community in its hands, at least at this stage.
In my limited experience with non-profits and owning/running a website that goes along with them, it is in the best interest of everyone that the holdings be owned by the association rather than individuals tied to the association. Simply put, regardless of how someone has dealt with the ownership in the past, if anything goes south, the first response is sometimes to spite them and yank the holdings and then you're screwed.
Operating the business behind the domain is one thing but having full ownership of it is another. If the group is serious about this being the face of Drupal, I suggest that they go into it the entire way before something similar to the recent ESR drama and they pull out after years of support.
That's not part of the platform. That's some random theme you picked. There are themes written well and themes not written well. Dries and others are extremely picky with the code allowed into the drupal core.
I have intimate knowledge of the drupal code and can easily say the parent is not at all informative. Drupal modules and core have no code that looks anything like this.
Developers: We can use your help.
What bizarro world do you live in?
... are published on the web site. Dries himself frequently runs benchmarks on Drupal and identifies areas where a patch can be improved. The community also polices itself when it comes to contributed modules, and tries to avoid overlap between them.
Yes, Drupal maintains high code standards, which are frequently a reason not to commit patches. All these practices, as well as detailed guidelines in terms of security, API usage, theming, localization,
Besides Dries, there are 4 other people with core commit access (including me). Two of those were added about a year ago, matching our increased growth. They are respected community members who have demonstrated fair and balanced judgement and excellent technical skills. We all maintain the same standards, and give each patch a fair review. For the Drupal 5.0 release, almost 500 people submitted patches. Several of those affected key parts of Drupal's core. Many of those have been and are still being developed as contributed modules that are slowly seeping into core. For example, Drupal 5 includes user-definable content types, which was incorporated from CCK.module.
When a patch is rejected, there is always a good reason given. Most people however forget that Drupal is used and deployed in a variety of scenarios, and that what goes for them doesn't necessary apply to others. This is why we try to make sure that as many parts of Drupal can be altered, extended or removed by modules, so that nobody needs to create a fork (which causes update/maintenance hassles).