What's New with Drupal

Led by Neil Drumm (Drupal Association)

Open-ended Q&A session...

Contributed modules (e.g., Organic Groups) porting to D7... are there alternatives?

Angie (@webchick) - Drupal 7 maintainer - did a roundup of top 20 projects at http://www.webchick.net/node/103 Hit-list for top Drupal 7 module stabilization

Organic Groups might be ready-ish. Talk of using it on Drupal.org so that means it’s doing OK.

Are a lot of people migrating to D7 from D6?

For every module on Drupal.org and Drupal itself, we have usage of the project, so we have usage stats - 214,812 D7 sites. Drupal 6 is bouncing around a little bit...staying steady. http://www.drupal.org/project/usage/ Drupal 5 is slowly going down.

Are you familiar w/ Migration module?

A little bit. The author wants to eventually use that as the default upgrade process from 7 to 8.

Modules are as good as the maintainers are for each module...

Should I be spending any time in Drupal 6?

For new sites, no. There’s no reason to use D6 for anything that you’re starting fresh.

D7 changed b/c everything’s an entity, right? Yes. it’s a unified way to store data across nodes... That abstraction makes stuff more consistent across Drupal. W/ Drupal 6 you can add things to nodes pretty easily with CCK but you couldn’t really do anything usefull with comments and users. But now, everything has the same type of data storage and extensability. you can potentially use a different type of storage system (e.g., NoSQL instead of MySQL)

NoSQL is like saying the cloud. Yes, a few dbs that are doc oriented, store a key in a value and there’s more stuff beyond relational dbs are very flexible but they dont solve all problems.

Is there a utility you can use to import data into Drupal? Yes. The Migrate module (http://drupal.org/project/migrate)

Kind of neat, but complicated. You have to setup both dbs in settings.php...basically building translations/mappings.

Is it easier to create a new, D7 site?

 Migrate solves a huge problem if you have old data (keeps UIDs, NIDs...)

New site could work better than before. Does it make sense to use Groups? Relations module? - a way to connect to entity types http://drupal.org/project/relation There’s a lot you can think about doing with the architecture of the site depending on what you want to do...

Must-have modules?

Tend to use what I need at the time - do research. Should check out Lullabot’s Module Mondays. Also, check out the Weekly Drop http://theweeklydrop.com/ for best Drupal news.

Open source power of community contrib. to issues and solutions

You should watch out for modules that aren’t on Drupal.org. If it’s a company writing a module for their own service or API it’s OK. We don’t do security support for stuff that’s not on Drupal.org.

Discussed privacy/security vs. convenience.

Who has access to your data?

How does Drupal decide how/when the architecture changes?

Initiative leaders are in charge. They meet and do the planning process there.

For example, field/entity-based storage for D7 - had 1 or 2 sprints w/ 10-15 people over a copule of weeks and figured otu this would be a good way to store data in drupal. Always going to be 5-10 people who drive any major decision... writer

Cloud-based systems?

Test bots test your batches...servers in private clouds hosting provider (Oregon State Univ Open Source Lab) have a little Amazon-like cloud for open source projects - we use that. We do our own servers, for the most part. Don’t do cloud-based as much. Not too worried about it, but we don’t have anything super sensitive. Gmail, Google Docs, Salesforce. Staff is in PDX, NYC, here, GA, AZ and Qatar.