tsvenson's picture

Posted by tsvenson on February 5, 2012 at 8:20pm

Hello Media fans,

I would like to take this opportunity to open a discussion about what the Media Support Squad should do to best help drive the Media Initiative.

First though I would like to welcome mtnguru and jerryitt as the first two members of the squad. I am really looking forward to work with you on helping to make Media great.

No Coding Skills Required

I would like to stress that there is room for everyone in the squad. You do not need any coding skills, just basic understanding of Drupal and web technology. In fact, in many cases less coding skills is an advantage since you then think as a users. As long as you have a keen interest to learn more and help out, that is enough to start with. We who know a little bit more are more than happy to help guide you to become a superstar squad member.

Also, we are not asking you to commit X hours to this. It's perfectly fine if you are able to help out an hour here and there.

Initial Squad Tasks

Now, what shall the support squad do? In my view, the immediate focus should be:

1. Help get a full 1.0 release out so we then can focus completely on the 2.x branch.
2. Go over all the open issues (around 300) to try and close as many as possible to get it down to a more manageable number.
3. Help the code developer testing patches and give feedback on the issues they currently work on.

Point 1 means focusing on the D7 stable release blocker list, which currently only has 2 open issues left for the 1.x branch. There might be one or two that needs backporting of those for the 2.x branch though. With so few left, we can hopefully wrap it up in no time at all.

To help you get a suitable Drupal installation I have started to work on a Media Support Squad feature module, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/207718, which makes it very easy to set up, or quickly re-install, a good working environment. Please have a look at it and give some feedback.

Its currently only available for the Media 1.x branch. Its also in the Full Project issue queue (since it is my first project on d.o), hopefully it soon be accepted so I can make it into a full project with easy to download modules. When that happens I will also add a feature that does the same for the 2.x branch. (If you are able to review the application please go here).

Point 2 will require a bit more work. However, I'm quite sure there are plenty of dupes or old issues that doesn't apply anymore. So, with a bit of willpower we should be able to churn through them pretty quick. Once that is done, we will have a much nicer and manageable issue queues to work with.

Point 3 is also important, the code developers, and other contributors, are working on many patches at the moment and good feedback means they can be committed quicker. Thus we can't forget them...

Those are the three points I would like to see us focusing on for the immediate future. I think it will also be a great way of getting to know each other better and find the best ways of working together.

Sooner rather than later we will not only have a 1.0 release, but also a 2.0...

Then what

I deliberately chose to call it Support Squad and not Bug Squad because I see us not only working on bugs, but also other tasks needed to help making media support for Drupal the best there is.

While we work on this we will gather a unique knowledge about everything the project covers, so once the first dust settles I would like us to also coordinate work with the Documentation team to improve the much needed documentation for the Media and File Entity modules. Our focus will be on the user documentation, while developers will have to deal with the more technical documentation.

OK, there you have my ideas about what the Media Support Squad should start working with.

Feel free to comment on the above and come with suggestion on how we best can support this very important Drupal project.

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: