Submitted by nk on Thu, 2011-09-01 19:25

Blog module has been stabbed in the git! Profile is dead! The rebels have their hands on trigger! Are these the days of Drupal Armaggeddon?

Absolutely to the contrary! After some core developers got really frustrated (and wrote some blog posts in fashion) an issue was started on Aug 21, 2011 to remove some 16 modules from core. The declared goal was to lighten the burden of maintaing core.

During the days of DrupalCon, we talked face to face, spent hours on the phone with those who missed the conference and wrote a few comments in the issue. The community have risen to meet this challenge like never before. In a span of eight days some 200 replies were posted. The list of the 16 condemned very quickly shrunk to seven, then shrunk more by saying, some parts of these modules need to be kept. That profile actually died wasn't a big surprise, it was already hidden in new D7 installations. The removal of blog, however, became another catalyst. The issue turned into a fantastic discussion of what the Drupal product should be, how should it be delivered and so on. No other modules are in imminent danger of being nuked. Even trigger might survive :)

Meanwhile, three four modules got new maintainers in core (dixon took comment, larowlan took forum, amateescu poll, and swentel shortcut), and deekayen voluntereed to maintain blog in contrib.

I am extremely proud of our community: even in these frustrated, desperate, passionate, heated moments there was not a single name-calling, flamewar-inducing post. Instead people have shown they care about Drupal and their fellow contributor's opinion. Any doubts over the health of the Drupal community are most certainly gone. There's an astonishing amout of energy, let's hope we can harness it to get bugs closed and onramp (nee Snowman) install profile developed along with the official core initiatives.