By ff1 on

I have read a lot posts recently from users complaining about the pace of drupal development (mainly in The Developers MUST Be Stopped!). Many users seem to feel that updating their complex sites to the latest drupal version can be a mammoth task. I don't want to get into any debates about whether the development should be slowed down or not as I'm sure you'll agree that has been covered :).

But I do want to propose a couple of potential solutions for those who feel the pace is too fast:

1. Get together a group of like-minded volunteers who are willing and able to give the time to maintain older versions of drupal. This maintenance would have to include any required contrib modules and themes as well as the drupal core.

2. Develop a contrib module that provides the current version of drupal with the API for any given old version of drupal. This module would need to provide the complete API for each old version of drupal, but would need to be configurable to only load the functions required for a particular site. This module would still need to keep up with the pace of drupal core, but there would be lots of helping hands available to update it.

Ok, so neither option is particularly straightforward, but there seem to be enough users who feel strongly about this to make both options feasible.

I'm not volunteering myself to setup either of these as I am updating my one site (and one custom module) to drupal 5 and plan to update it to drupal 6 as soon as it is available. So I don't think I would really find either of my proposals very useful, but I'm putting them out there just in case anyone else thinks they are good ideas and wants to run with them.

Comments

ff1’s picture

ff1 commented

Obviously, none of the users who were so emotive in the 'The Developers MUST Be Stopped!' thread want to get off their backsides and actually do something about it!