Why is Drupal 7 Not Released Yet?

Lately I have sensed there is a growing impatience among Drupal users about that it, for some, seems to take forever for Drupal 7 to be ready, or even come out in a beta release. Many of those complaining about the delays have also indicated that they are not going to give it a spin until the beta is out - Because its too buggy right now. Of course it is buggy, that is why it is still in alpha. Its also still in alpha because the upgrade path from Drupal 6 isn't fully working yet.

I too would love to see the beta released yesterday, the RC tomorrow and the official release next week. However, that won't happen and I fully understand that. Drupal 7 is not a small update, it's a gigantic leap where a lot of very important API's have been completely rewritten from scratch, partly rewritten or added to core, such as CCK, ImageCache, ImageField, FileField and so on. Not to talk about all the new stuff when it comes to improve the usability, administration and so on.

Its not a small task to get all that working together, make sure it is following the Drupal code standards, have all the documentation, both for developers and users ready. Then to also make sure that it is possible to upgrade a Drupal 6 website to Drupal 7, with all the API changes, makes it an even tougher task.

Community Effort

As I have explained in my series about Drupal 7 being ready for production sites, read part 1 here, the development is a community effort by individuals and companies that volunteers their time and resources to make this happen. The central community website, drupal.org, now is almost 900,000 members strong. That's soon one million people that wants to be part of the Drupal movement.

Then if we look at how many that are actually involved in developing Drupal 7, providing patches for it, it tells a quite different story. At DrupalCon San Francisco in April this year, Dries delivered his usual keynote about the State of Drupal (watch the whole speech here). In it he showed the slide you can see here to the right. It is a graph showing the number of Drupal 7 Core contributors.

Just over 700 people have contributed patches to Drupal 7. Not a bad number, but that is counting the long tail. In his speech Dries said that 25 people have contributed 50% of the patches. I realise not everyone have the needed skills to pitch in at this level, but 25 people out of 900,000 is a very small number for a community of this size.

90% of the Time to Fix 10% of the Bugs

One effort the Drupal community is often organising is Code Sprints. At these events Drupal users get together to work on a particular task. It happens at DrupalCons, DrupCamps and are also organised by individuals or companies in between. One such sprint was hosted by Acquia in Boston last Tuesday, August 17, and I wrote about that yesterday (see the end).

Later yesterday Barry Jaspan, Acquia, published a blog post with a summary from that event. In that post he wrote:

Drupal 7 has been in development for 2.5 years. The good news is that we are finally, finally reaching the end. As I write this, there are only 8 open beta blocker issues (to be fixed before beta release) and 28 open critical issues (to be fixed before Drupal 7.0-RC1). That's not a lot.

The bad news is that pretty much all of these remaining issues are hard.

That is not at all surprising to me. I think everyone that have some experience developing software have come across the phrase:

It takes 10% of the time to fix 90% of the bugs and 90% of the time to fix the remaining.

It is a lot of truth in that. The closer you get to the release, the trickier the remaining bugs are. In a project such as Drupal there are a lot of complexity going on. A bug might seem simple to fix, but then it creates a side effect and breaks something else, causing almost a domino effect.

Also, Drupal is a CMF (Content Management Framework). Very few sites are built using only the core features. Even small sites will install tens of contributed modules to enable the features the site needs. Take this site for example. I am basically just using the blog module, but still I have installed 17 additional modules because Drupal 7 Core was not enough for me.

To make that possible without modules breaking core, or each other, is also part of the development of Drupal 7. This is one of the strong arguments for Drupal, and I don't think anyone of you want to compromise with that.

Stop Waiting and Start Helping

As I mentioned in the beginning, I have seen a lot of people that is simply just waiting for Drupal 7 to be ready. Sure it is your right to do so, but please don't complain about it not being ready yet.

To use a popular Hollywood phrase - You don't need to be a rocket scientist to help! Everyone can chip in and help at some level. A few days ago I wrote the Drupal 7 for Production Websites Part 3: How you can help post about just that. In that post I give you an overview about what you can do when it comes to Drupal 7 Core, contributed modules and documentation. It contains links to resources so you easily can find something suiting your skill level and that you can help with.

Its a good start to get you going. I'm sure you will be surprises about how much you actually can contribute with, no matter what your skills are.

The more that pitch in, the quicker it will be ready!