Looking Back

Drupal 7 was a huge endeavor. The release took three years and had 1,000 contributors, with 30 people being responsible for 50% of the improvements. In discussions with the community, Buytaert feels that the things they did well were:

• Test-driven development
• Updating the development documentation as patches were accepted
• Having a usability team
• Taking development snapshots, especially at the code freeze stage
• Having an accessibility team

On the other hand, there were things they could do better. Buytaert identified the following areas where he’d like to improve during the cycle for Drupal 8:

• Many people wanted to work on a feature or a bug but weren’t sure if they’d be accepted
• Some felt the release cycle was too short, and some too long — the main complaint was that no one knew when it would be ready
• Lack of high-bandwidth communication
• Better and stronger priorities, rather than letting them get muddy at the end
• Too many critical bugs, there were 400-500 in the code freeze
• Performance seemed like an afterthought

Drupal 8

The development branch for Drupal 8 opens today. People will work on their code in a Git sandbox, and it will have to pass through a number of gates before it’s accepted into the main tree. These gates will mostly involve the main priorities (which he’s dubbed initiatives) for the next version:

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Documentation
• Testing
• No critical bugs

Rather than having a single co-maintainer, Buytaert will appoint an owner for each of the initiatives. This move, he hopes, will increase the project’s bandwidth and communication internally. Other focuses for Drupal 8 will include:

• Publishing to any device, which means being more flexible in the types of code Drupal 8 can output
• Pulling information from any source
• Social features and the individual experience

Initiatives he’s identified for multi-device publishing include web services, contexts, CSS3, HTML 5 and mark-up free core. For dealing with any information, they’ll focus on interoperability, such as clean APIs and standards-based connectors. And to provide a “delightful experience,” the push for usability will continue.

To help large-scale Drupal users, there are two more important features Drupal 8 needs to address:

• Configuration management
• Content staging

Finally, Buytaert discussed the need to have a strong ecosystem around Drupal, as that is how the top players in techology today are driving adoption. To that end, they’ll be focusing on further improvements to Drupal.org and initiatives such as the Git migration.

This isn’t a short or simple list. To get started, he says they’ll focus on web services, HTM L5, UUIDs and configuration management.

(from cmswire)

As Egyptians took to the streets and overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak, millions of people throughout the world turned to Al Jazeera for coverage. The global interest in events in the Middle East drove record levels of visitors to the news agency’s Web servers. Traffic to Al Jazeera’s site increased by 1,000% and that to its Drupal-based live blog increased by 2,000% during the crisis in Egypt, according to a blog post by Dreis Buytaert, Drupal creator and the founder of Acquia, which is now providing its elastic service for the international news organization.

Previously, Al Jazeera’s site was hosted by a traditional Web host, but the demands caused by the surge required more resources. That’s where Acquia comes in, commanded by Buytaert, who also serves as lead developer.

In the move, Al Jazeera transferred its live blog to Acquia’s Managed Cloud service. Like other cloud hosts, Acquia offers elastic resources so that sites can scale up – and back down – with ease. Unlike general purpose cloud hosts, Acquia specializes in Drupal, enabling it to fine tune its servers’ performance to the CMS’s particular needs.

“Fast forward a few weeks, and the demands on Al Jazeera’s Web infrastructure have only increased with new crises across the region,” wrote Buytaert. But at some point the traffic level will taper down again. As readwriteweb pointed out recently, the ability to scale-down is one of the unsung advantages of cloud services.

Several other news media companies use Drupal, including The Economist, Fox News and Mother Jones. But regardless of the underlying CMS, news agencies should consider elastic hosting to handle spikes.