Drupal

Friday afternoon a fascinating conversation broke out at the SandCamp (San Diego) coder lounge about how to get more people contributing to core (and reviewing issues).

One of the issues mentioned is how people can't use the development version of core to build sites on and later have to deal with all the new changes to core when the next version comes out.

If there was a way to get people using drupal 8 now, for production sites, that'd help in various ways:

• Improve the update handler to add an installer that can parse a feed (or however is best) of modules, search, organize in some way so users can install modules from a drupal.org install that it, and it's dependency will be downloaded fromAdd an icon for modules (non-required, but it looks snazzy, man).

If you've used features, you'll likely noticed that adding one thing will automatically add other items. The items added are sometimes dependencies (e.g. adding a view will automatically add dependency for 'views'), but other times it'll be additional items (e.g. adding a blog adds the blog fields.). However other items, like settings added to the content type form won't be, which often surprises the newer feature builder. This is because features, or modules hooking in, need to automatically tell the feature to add any component.

It does these through a series of hook.

When setting it up, I first looked to see if there was any existing single person, developer focused blog features or install profiles. I was unable to find one, at least not on drupal.org. So I had a few choices to consider.