Edit comment Wow, quite a discussion. Jen

Administration

Authored by

Leave blank for Anonymous.

Homepage

Authored on

Status

Published

Not published

Comment *

Wow, quite a discussion.  Jen sent me a link to this after I asked her if I should wait for D8 to release before starting a couple of projects.  (Her and I are both working on Thanksgiving Day.)  This long thread makes my decision easy, build on D7 now.

I'm a newbie to Drupal and developing marketplace platforms to solve problems in various industries.  I'm an entrepreneur so these projects are for me, not a client.  I only need enough functionality to test ideas and hopefully find market traction.  D7 seems to be fine for that but it needs substantial UX / UI improvement.

I watched Dries' keynote at Drupalcon Sydney.  He wants to develop software that will power Amazon and Apple.  Wonderful, but I don't want that stuff.  We've seen the pain that kind of software can cause.   (Healthcare.gov? The failed systems at the FBI and FAA?)

I've been on the sidelines of software application development since the 1960's with IBM's System 360 project, the first real business computer, and punch cards.  While I love coding I prefer working with coders to develop software to solve biz problems or give competitive advantage.  This is called dev/ops now.  (I tried to talk Jobs into building me a computer for job costing for construction companies in 1977.)

I helped develop the original desktop software for a couple dozen industries.

My wife is in dev/ops for a 6,000 employee national employee benefits brokerage.  She helps with internal app dev, employee training, and more. We talk daily about their issues.

So from this perspective and 4 platform marketplace sites to build I read the above thread.

The fork is the correct path to take.  Backdrop should target SMB, small and medium business, and let the D8 folks go after the Fortune 1,000.  These are different markets with different needs and IT abilities.  The code should be elegant enough to maintain and work well.  The UI needs to be friendly to the target market and features meet their needs (UX).  Nothing else matters in biz.  Wildly different upgrades are unwelcome.  They are new software and require more due diligence and add stress.

The discussion here shouldn't be about 1st or 2nd tier developers and what is best for module devs.  It should only be about meeting the requirements for a market.  If you are hitting a market well and there is lots of paying work the modules will get built much faster than designing software to make it easier to update modules.

There is a lot of awkwardness in D7 that should be fixed such as the blocks / panels / views thing.  These are nice functionally and I love the power but the whole concept needs to be reworked.  This is what Backdrop can do and it may inform Drupal.  Backdrop is the main branch of Drupal.  D8 seems to be a fork.

Thanks everyone for your wonderful work and as I get more into Drupal I'll contribute.

Jim Preston
SV Startup Lab
Santa Clara, CA

Formatting options

Basic

To post pieces of code, surround them with <code>...</code> tags. For PHP code, you can use <?php ... ?>, which will also color it based on syntax.
Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically, unless the parent tag has the 'nolink' class.
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <div> <p> <br> <pre> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <figure> <img> <figcaption> <hr>

Cancel

Leave this field blank