Dries Buytaert

Drupal 7: let's get it done

Despite a great effort from many people, getting Drupal 7 released has proven to be a slow and arduous process. What remains is not trivial. The release of Drupal 7 is important to all of us, our businesses, and growing both adoption and our community, so something more must be done.

Effective today, Acquia is committing one full-time engineer to help to fix critical bugs in Drupal 7. This is in addition to the regular work that our staff does on Drupal 7 as part of the development of Drupal Gardens, and the core work that some of our engineers do as part of their community gardening days (similar to Google's "20-percent time").

The team itself will decide who that engineer will be but it is likely to be one of the following people: Alex Bronstein (effulgentsia), Gábor Hojtsy, Jacob Singh, Peter Wolanin (pwolanin), Katherine Senzee (ksenzee) or David Rothstein. They'll decide that later today as part of the sprint planning. I'll announce it in the comments this afternoon!

As a community, we need to get better at focusing on the critical bugs. There are only about 20 critical bugs left so with the right focus, we're in striking distance of getting Drupal 7 out. Hence, the Acquia engineer will be working on critical issues only. It's all about focus.

And we want you to join us! We could use more companies to step up and contribute a dedicated resource. The deployment and adoption of Drupal 7 will deliver big benefits to all of our businesses.

We're all very much committed to our clients and have daily tasks to perform as part of our livelihood. So we don't always have the time to work on the remaining bugs in Drupal 7. However, if we don't address them, if we don't plan time to work on them, it just won't happen. If you'd be interested in pitching in with this enormous effort by contributing a dedicated resource, but don't know where to go, or where help is needed most, I can help direct you to the right places. Just let me know you're interested in helping.

— Dries Buytaert

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