Drupal 8 development started under the new Git Drupal.org infrastructure

15 Mar 2011 | by web site visitor

Beyond celebrating the 10 years of Drupal in Chicago the Drupal community had one more thing to celebrate. Following the release of Drupal 7 in January this year, Dries, the leader of the Drupal project, officially opened the development branch for Drupal 8 in-front of attendants in Chicago and announced it to the world via a tweet.

“We created the Drupal 8 branch live at DrupalCon. Screenshot attached. /cc @sboyer #drupalchi #drupalcon http://yfrog.com/h6f2pqjj” - http://twitter.com/Dries/status/45966454343991296

Development for Drupal 8 is expected to take at least 18 months (although the last cycle lasted more than 3 years). A big hope this time is that the move from CVS to Git for code versioning and collaboration will speed up the development and enable different groups of people to work whilst allowing the results to be merged more easily.

Dries, in his keynote speech and subsequent presentations outlined his plans for development. Several so-called “initiatives” will be undertaken, each with its own initiative leader chosen by Dries. The results of an initiative will then be merged back into the main Drupal 8 branch after having passed a number of “gates” such as accessibility, performance, usability, etc.

The general consensus by other Drupal core developers is that this is an appropriate approach and already several initiatives have been proposed. Dries indicated that only a few at any given time would be undertaken and there would be a strict limit on the number of critical bugs that would be allowed to exist at any moment (no more than 15). This would allow for a tighter control of the release cycle. Drupal 7 development at times had to deal with more than 400 critical bugs - one of the main factors that led to the delay in releasing the latest Drupal version.

Hopefully this time round a tighter cycle of just under 2 years will be met.

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