For the past couple years, discussions about 'PSR-0', PHP standards, and some sort of framework standardizations have been popping up here and there. It wasn't until a bunch of 'PSR-0 Interoperability' patches started popping up in the Drupal core issue queues that I decided to take a closer look at PSR. (The latest? PSR-1 (Basic Coding Standard) and PSR-2 (Coding Style Guide) have been accepted).
Drupal 7. Is it ready?
That seems to be the general question in the air over the past few weeks discussed by many in the community. There's a problem with this question, though... I think many people look at their particular use cases, determine Drupal 7 to not (yet) be a good fit, then declare all things Drupal 7 to be lacking.
Really, though, are things so bad? I've seen hundreds of sites on Drupal Gardens that are beautiful and functional. I've upgraded two of my simpler Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7. I've built a total of fifteen Drupal 7 sites—some serving more than 10,000 visitors a day, others serving a hundred or two (and almost all on shared hosting!)—and am working on three others. So, for me, the question 'Is Drupal 7 ready for prime-time?' doesn't make sense. It's already there (I haven't started a new project on Drupal 6 for six months now).
The sparsely-attended 'Scaling the Drupal Community' session, led by webchick and heyrocker, was one of the few sessions I've attended at DrupalCon Chicago that held my interest throughout. And, since a few people on IRC asked me to post my session notes, I thought I'd do so and put them up on the Planet.
If you, like me, thought there were too many awesome sessions during this timeslot that you decided to go to another one, then this post is for you—I believe that anyone invested in Drupal's future stands to gain something from reflecting on what webchick said at the session.
Now, on to the notes. I will give a summary of a statement by webchick, then my reflection (kind of a Q&A format):
Drupal Answers is a new Stack Exchange site for answering Drupal questions, and it's in public beta right now. The site is hosted off the 'drupal.org' family of sites, and has a few hundred users so far...
Webchick: Webchick basically stated that she's leaning towards what we already have (with slight adjustments). She mentioned that there's no good answer for the question of motivating people to help support drupal newbies without incentives (a karma or reputation system).
Also, she said that moving the support away from drupal.org is potentially very dangerous; this could lead the 'newbie' community away from the 'expert' community (which tends to discuss things in drupal.org issue queues. Right now, 'newbies' typically hang around in drupal.org forums, and 'experts' typically stick to their trackers and issue queues.