President/Founder of DPCI

As President of DPCI, Joe directs all operations, business development, R&D, partnerships and marketing activities at the company.

Joe enjoys blogging about various trends in content technologies, on project management best practices, and also on his insights into the operations of running the business of DPCI.

Blogs

Recent Webinars

> Integrating K4 and Drupal to Support Multi-channel Workflows

White Papers

> Best Practice Design Tools for Content Management Templating

> Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits: Do They Support Your Business Model?

> The Challenges with ECM With or Without a Down Economy

April 20, 2010

On Hacking Drupal Core and Contributing Back to the Open Source Community Project

Del.icio.us

Technorati

Digg

StumbleUpon

Here's an article by Ron Miller that expounds on Seth Gottlieb's blog on the drawbacks of hacking Drupal core. The Onion implemented version 4.7 of Drupal several years back and mightily hacked core for the functionality and performance it needed. Recently, the Onion - a company with a number of staff developer resources - decided to migrate to a different WCMS (Django) that they felt was more of a programmers' framework than that of Drupal.

The Onion got its return on investment many times over by using available technology - they also have bragging rights to actually having done something impressive with Drupal 4.x. However, had the Onion implementation team gotten more involved in contributing back to the main project, they may indeed have reduced the risk of a branched version. Their decision to abandon Drupal for a different project is regrettable, since their team's experience could really have helped improve Drupal these past few years and The Onion would have benefited in the process.

The situation holds true for contrib modules as well as core code. When implementing Drupal, during module selection (and after requirements documentation) the team needs to perform a gap analysis on what modules need to be customized/modified. You can then contribute those customizations back to the project, or at least document the changes that you'll need to maintain in the future.

Also, periodically you may find that you'll use and/or customize a module that is no longer maintained by someone in the community. At that entry point you could decide whether you'd like to become the maintainer, or look to migrate to a different module that is maintained.

Posted at 12:12 pm by Joseph Bachana

Technorati Tags:

Del.icio.us

Technorati

Digg

StumbleUpon

Add comment

More Blogs From Author:

So How Much Did Drupalcon San Francisco Rock? A LOT! 04/27/2010 - 14:39
On Opentext's acquisition of NStein 02/24/2010 - 09:48
Why don't we teach project management to school kids? 01/14/2010 - 23:15
A review of Dana Blankenhorn's blog on ZDNet regarding venture capital backed open-source software vendors not getting acquired 01/09/2010 - 13:31
Review of article by Bruce Jensen on Folio Magazine's website 01/06/2010 - 18:43
Review of Bryan Ruby's Blog post re: Drupal Vs. Joomla! 12/18/2009 - 09:24
re: Jeff Eaton's Blog Rounding up whitehouse.gov Drupal Implementation coverage 11/03/2009 - 15:15
On Matt Asay's "R.I.P., open-source evangelism" 10/28/2009 - 17:50
CMSmatch.com comparison matrix of Drupal with EZPublish 10/03/2009 - 17:48
Commentary on Cheryl McKinnon's Departure from OpenText to join the Nuxeo Management Team 09/30/2009 - 23:06

Contact DPCI to learn more about our Web content management systems,
digital asset management solutions, online collaboration software, custom development, multi-channel publishing systems, and workflow management solutions.