I noticed some discussion in this conference call about a few topics and wanted to share my ideas. I've got some experience in Drupal as a developer and general community member, so that's my frame of reference.
My first reaction to the project is split:
1) This is awesome! It will get more people involved in Drupal.
2) This is a bummer. It gets them involved in a separate group with separate (but really similar) goals and the separate group may fork.
So, I think that to get knowledgable developers interested you are going to have to do two things a little better:
1) Make it louder and more clear that you are not going to fork! There was only one mention of this idea. It would be nice to see the "it's not a fork" message a little more prominent and consistent. In the footer maybe? But more specifically, it would be nice to see policies about contributing upstream. Will documentation that's about Gnomepal but also about Drupal be contributed back upstream? Is the goal for the Gnomepal admin panel to become the default? Will lots of stuff be maintained as Gnomepal specific modules? If any modules are created will they be hosted on *.gnomepal.* or will they be hosted on Drupal.org? etc.
2) Be sure to use Drupal as much as possible. There's mention of using Trac and for _not_ using the Drupal forums. Why? The Drupal project* module is awesome, but it needs help. Perhaps you can provide some of that help to make it more usable. Same for forums. Etc. If you want to be taken seriously as a responsible Drupal distribution (which will be necessary, IMO, if you want to attract current Drupal develoeprs) then you are going to need to be committed to using Drupal tools as much as possible.
I think that perhaps some of these things have been addressed in the time since the meeting (especially having seen this) but just wanted to give my thoughts on the topic.
I noticed some discussion in this conference call about a few topics and wanted to share my ideas. I've got some experience in Drupal as a developer and general community member, so that's my frame of reference.
My first reaction to the project is split:
1) This is awesome! It will get more people involved in Drupal.
2) This is a bummer. It gets them involved in a separate group with separate (but really similar) goals and the separate group may fork.
So, I think that to get knowledgable developers interested you are going to have to do two things a little better:
1) Make it louder and more clear that you are not going to fork! There was only one mention of this idea. It would be nice to see the "it's not a fork" message a little more prominent and consistent. In the footer maybe? But more specifically, it would be nice to see policies about contributing upstream. Will documentation that's about Gnomepal but also about Drupal be contributed back upstream? Is the goal for the Gnomepal admin panel to become the default? Will lots of stuff be maintained as Gnomepal specific modules? If any modules are created will they be hosted on *.gnomepal.* or will they be hosted on Drupal.org? etc.
2) Be sure to use Drupal as much as possible. There's mention of using Trac and for _not_ using the Drupal forums. Why? The Drupal project* module is awesome, but it needs help. Perhaps you can provide some of that help to make it more usable. Same for forums. Etc. If you want to be taken seriously as a responsible Drupal distribution (which will be necessary, IMO, if you want to attract current Drupal develoeprs) then you are going to need to be committed to using Drupal tools as much as possible.
I think that perhaps some of these things have been addressed in the time since the meeting (especially having seen this) but just wanted to give my thoughts on the topic.