April 20, 2010

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

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Also, periodically you may find that you'll use and/or customize a module that is no longer maintained by someone in the community.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

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