[meta] Plan for Token 7.x-1.6 release [#2182905]

Obviously Token is a great module! It's used by over 60% of all installed Drupal sites. Token is the 3rd most popular contrib module with over 622k installs.

Yet there are 4 issues that are marked RTBC in this module in the last year. Almost a full page of D7 issues waiting to be reviewed. And it's been almost a full year since the last release.

Would be nice to add a meta description (probably here) of what should go into a future release and what issues are getting in the way of that.

The broader issue however is that I think that there should be incentives to ensure that people who are contributing to it are recognized. There should be some motivation to go through the issue queue and see that reports that people have made are acknowledged, repeatable, fixable and eventually closed.

I've blogged about the use of Flattr & Gittip. The latter brought up some great discussions about initiatives like Top Shelf Modules and DrupalFund.us.

Adoption of any of those platforms seems to be pretty slow though. Gittip has the greatest acceptance on d.o because there is at least a form on each users Profile page to add it in, and yet, there has been marginal increase in the adoption or donation rates https://www.gittip.com/for/drupal/

I tried to highlight how Gittip could be incorporated into d.o's issue queue in order to provide incentives to individual contributors. From feedback there, I decided to look at how Corporate logos could be incorporated into the issue queues (even for anonymous users).

None of these solutions is without it's problems. Some of these solutions will work better to support some projects than others. I think there are probably hundreds of other ways to help shape participation in the Drupal community such that end users, developers, designers and Drupal shops are able to find easier ways to contribute back. But I think we need to get the conversation moving about how to see that important projects like this get the support that they need to see that they are properly resourced.

There's a place to discuss Drupal.org improvements in GDO but there isn't a lot of active participation there.

Ultimately, what kinds of UI changes would help make this module better maintained? For folks who are active contributors, what would help you? Is finding time for maintenance seen as a problem?

Comments

Comment #1

mgifford

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English

CreditAttribution: mgifford commented 27 January 2014 at 18:57

Issue tags:

+maintenance

Comment #2

Dave Reid

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Nebraska USA

CreditAttribution: Dave Reid commented 27 January 2014 at 19:07

It's been a full year since the latest release because at this point there's not a whole lot that can be improved or big things that need fixing. The UI always needs improvement but that would be in a separate branch. I don't think anything here really needs fixing per-say.

Comment #3

mgifford

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English

CreditAttribution: mgifford commented 27 January 2014 at 20:19

I can't speak to which of these issues are reproducible and fixable within this release, but there are about a full page of open D7 issues in the last two years marked as bugs. So, maybe we just need to find some incentive such that we can bring that list down to a more manageable list.

The documentation looks good, but I haven't tried to use it.

There is no 2.0 branch at this point to allow us to fix the UI issues.

This isn't a criticism of the work that the maintainers are doing with this module. However, imagine what would be possible if even a fraction of the 622k installs of Drupal simply gave $1/year to this project for maintenance.

That may or may not provide resources to address those lingering issues and possibly put out a new release. But I figure it's worth asking the question.