The Drupal Diaries

When Pigs Fly is actually a Drupal sandbox project.

Though there are contributed Modules on the Drupal.org website that are far more useless than this one, the chances are high that When Pigs Fly will never quite make it there. 

Nonetheless, there are some developers that may find this useful, if only for the practical jokes you can play on a fellow Drupal developers.

A lot of Drupal developers may be a bit surprised to find the standard installation of a Drupal contributed module does not check for potential url conflicts between different implementations of hook_menu().

The objective is to help developers become aware of potential url conflicts within the Drupal environment.

This blog is about the Drupal code reviews. There are 3 kinds of reviews, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Although many complain that the process is slow, it can proceed quite quickly. I have have my module reviewed 7 times time now. The shortest wait was 42 minutes; the longest wait was 66 days.

After more than a year now, I have given up hope it will ever be approved , partly because now I am writing blogs like this. Drupalistas do not take kindly to criticism.

To quote and paraphrase Grouch Marx -- "I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member" or maybe "I never forget a face Open Source Project, but in your case I'll make an exception."

For over two years now, the Drupal.org website has had a policy in place regarding contributions by new members.

Members who have contributed before are exempt from this process.

The typical wait for a code review has climbed from 5 days to 5 weeks, to 3 months.

The attrition rate for this process is about 55%, based on a sample last month.

Although projects from new members are being approved at the rate of 1 per day, this represents only a small slice of the new Full Project modules that appear every month.

Current members with FP status can publish new modules at will without any scrutiny or community review, breaking all kinds of rules that new members must observe.

Apply the same standards to everyone. Make everyone climb the same wall or knock down the wall altogether.

This blog is about the Drupal community, new members who would like to contribute a module or theme, and the process now in place to regulate that.

Eating their young

Just recently I came across an old blog: Module Approval Process will KILL Drupal. It's almost 1½ years old now.  It provoked a lot of discussion back then. I agree with much that was said. Unfortunately, almost nothing has changed.

Drupal sites are subject to web-bot registrations that target Drupal's /user/register url.

The Members Page module was crafted to fight this nuisance by creating a dedicated members page and registration page. The latter is available even if /user/register access is blocked. For added security, both page locations (url's) can be changed. Web-bots simply don't know where to look.

It does not depend on any other modules. Enabling the module does not alter your site configuration in any way although some configuration changes are necessary for practical use.