Getting to Panopoly 1.0 and beyond!

Panopoly is a Drupal base distribution that provides a solid and robust starting point for those wanting to build their own Drupal websites and distributions. The Panopoly project was started by Pantheon’s Matt Cheney and its really beginning to taking off. There are many major distributions moving to it (such as OpenAcademy and OpenAtrium) and more new ones picking it up all the time. The idea of a distribution to build distributions has clearly struck a chord!

As maintainers of Open Academy we have been pretty heavily involved with Panopoly. After a while it became apparent that one of the main roadblocks to building off of Panopoly was the the rate of development and how quickly patches were being reviewed and integrated upstream. It had been almost 4 months since the last release candidate (RC5). Lots of people were using the code, submitting patches, and even (to a lesser degree) reviewing – but those patches were just sitting in the queue, waiting to be committed. Our make files for Open Academy had some 12 patches applied against Panopoly, and the same was true for Open Atrium. Maintaining that number of patches is a burden to say the least.

Luckily, the Drupal community is never far away and when David Snopek reached out to me suggesting that I become a co-maintainer for the Panopoly project I was both flattered and extremely happy to oblige. We discussed this for a while in the Drupal.org issue queues before Matt, David and I met in a Google Hangout to talk things through in person.

Since then David and I have both been granted official co-maintainer status on the Panopoly project and have been working hard to get the backlog of patches tested and committed. Additionally, we have set up a Panopoly group on groups.drupal.org where people interested in Panopoly can get together to discuss things related to the project.

Our plan now is to try and get an initial 1.0 release out of the door before Christmas. There is a discussion on the Panopoly group about what exactly a 1.0 release should include, but the thinking at this point is to focus our efforts on getting the backlog cleared and getting things as current and stable as possible…

I committed over 15 patches today!… Here’s to Panopoly 1.0 and beyond!