Professional community for 10-year Drupal 7 LTS 2015-2025

Today, October 15th 2014 launched an intermediate 3-month Content Management services web community which includes an invitation for businesses that want to participate in planning a long term Drupal project. We will focus on SMB - Small and Medium Size businesses, and maintain a set of distributions based on Drupal 7 along with something between 300-500 contributed modules and themes.

I have been part of the Drupal community since its start, check my user ID and creation date, it is from the first month Drupal went public, almost a 'millennium' ago ;-)
I have seen all the processes that Drupal has gone through, and taken part of all the dilemmas related to stability challenges versus budget concerns.

Here is an example:

In 2005, which at the moment we will be launching the 10-year LTS - next january - is actually 10 years ago, we were very happy with the progress of Drupal, which at that stage had finally reached what we thought was the level of maturity after years of struggle and changes. We were sooo close. I loved Drupal 4 and 5, especially the flexibility of the multitude of taxonomy-related modules, etc.

But: we lacked a few seemingly small things, security architecture and what is now the CCK fields architecture, and decent and easy handling of multimedia. You did not get nice image galleries without substantial investment in time and perhaps also money. Then there was the fantastic perspectives and slowly maturing tools of the great Merlin of Drupal. One particular example here is that the Pageroute module which was almost ready, ceased its progress, partly because of the perspetives of Drupal 6 and the next architecture and developments of PageManager (cTools) that could replace its functionality. Pageroute was really great, but just at the doorstep of a stable, working release, it stopped, and died.

Lots of projects in the D5 realm was left behind due to the substantial - and both important, pleasing and impressive new architecture of Drupal. However, the new problem was that D6 fell betweeen two chairs. The change in both architecture AND security did never really cut it until roundabout 3 years in to the next Drupal release - in D7 anno 2014... That is roughly 10 years of "in-between-chairs", so to speak. We largely skipped D6 entirely, stayed with D5 and unfinished modules waiting for the new platform to mature, and now it has.

At the same time, we have had 10+ years of heavy work on Multi-lingual features, combining it with both security and revisioning and entities, which is VERY important, and only just becoming close to mature. There are a few things left, especially when it comes to stability, final bug fixes and security. But we are "there", practically.

Where, exactly? Well, close to where we felt with D4 in 2005.

Same notion: VERY close to finally having a whole and stable platform we can START considering for LONG TERM projects and long term competence building.

We want the next 10 years to be stable. We want to finally get going with some serious content management efforts on a long-term platform, therefore this D7LTS15 initiative.

We will underways of course continue to be part of the further Drupal developments and support the community, and will see later in which direction we choose to upgrade the LTS platform.
I invite for a discussion about these perspectives here on drupal.org.

The member-only business community we establish can be found at www.artwist.me, a temporary blog/community site which will turn into the first "LTS" platform community on January 15th, 2015.

Regards,
Leeteq

Edit: Correction/clarification:
Long ago, I fell in love with number "5", and so my memory mixed and matched the lovely numbers as I wrote this original post, so suddenly 2005 was also Drupal 5 - wonderful "match" :-). However, we were very exited about Drupal 4.6, and even more so with both 4.7 (as was such a big change that many of us argued it should have been numbered 5 instead), and then Drupal 5, which I stayed on for maaany years. My example regarding Pageroute was related to Drupal 5, however, roughly 2007-2008. The point of my 10-year period reference is related to the year 2005, not the version numbers. We were actively networking in 2005 to start recruiting people for Drupal projects, and we were really - naively - thinking that we were close to having a stable platform at that time, and that things such as security concerns would be addressed "shortly", which hampered strategic modules such as Organic Groups, preventing lots of projects that really needed content security to get off the ground (not to "blame" of any of the maintainers, but the nature of Open Source, which we love - but we have also become more and more aware of its true hidden costs - especially timewise. This background is at the heart of the 10-year D7LTS15 initiative that this post is about.)