Applying to be Maintainer

This project has an official status "Seeking new maintainer" since 8 Feb 2016. So I'm not wondering that currently nobody is officially working on a Drupal 8 branch. There is my primary focus including new ideas that I already posted in the Port Boost for Drupal 8 issue.

I often saw discussions about Boost where some people arguing about newer, faster caching technologies in Drupal etc. when suggesting to drop this project. But bypassing any kind of PHP and Database processes wherever it's possible is still a good strategy in my opinion.

I used this module since my first Drupal 6 projects in 2008. In the beginning it was only a good caching possibility in shared hosting situations. But currently I think it also can be a good solution for modern Drupal 8 High Performance setups even when a really fast caching technology like Redis is involved. Especially the newest SSD based file systems are not only boosting database servers they also boosting file caches. With Boost Drupal is able to directly control this cache incl. purging. Nginx is often suggested to directly serve the static files of Drupal like Images, CSS an JS. Beside the fact that it also can process PHP directly it is a perfect "Boost Server". You can still use Proxy Caching Technologies in front of Boost but I think with Boost this only needed on very high traffic sites.

The Boost module has inspired me for a product of my company where we generate HTML files with curl and serving this files very secure in Boost "rewrite-style" because PHP and Database are not available. This product was created to avoid the need of CMS updates. Currently we are implementing this technology for a special Maintenance mode of a dynamic Drupal for example when we have highly critical security vulnerabilities. A feeling of "giving back" is a little bit involved in this offer but my company has also an interest in a good maintenance of boost. And beside high performance situations we also provide shared hosting plans where we are interested to save server resources for the environment and to reduce costs.

I'm already maintaining some Modules and I'm very experienced with server configuration (Apache and Nginx). And beside my own time I already organized some external help by two other developers and trying to get more people involved. I promoted Boost and it's need for further development this spring on a Drupalcamp: "Secure and/or boost performance with static HTML". In my session I announced that I want to push the Drupal 8 solution. But this only makes sense when cooperating with existing maintainers or to step in directly.

I start with this issue in the modules issue queue and will try to contact the maintainer directly before moving to "Drupal.org project ownership".