I turned off comments on yesterday's post because it doesn't need to turn into a flame-war or a love-fest, and I apologize to all who feel the burning need to comment and cannot. I'll go ahead and leave comments on this post open, but I will aggressively delete comments that bait, flame, or are simply "I love you, man" comments. I'm not looking for flames, nor an ego-boost here. I've got a gripe and I needed to get that off my chest or I would continue burning with it for days.

I'm pretty impressed at all the excitement coming out of the whole design4drupal initiative. Lots of people are talking, and the chatter is everywhere. Unfortunately, from my perspective, it's looking like it may actually turn out to be one of the most damaging things that can happen to Drupal, and this one is bothering me at a very deep level. And perhaps this is something that's been building up, because I have definitely noticed my enthusiasm waning over the last year, and things like this are really putting a bullet into the heart of it.

I've spent a lot of my 'between' time thinking about what I want to see for the next major revisions of Views, and I've finally decided to sit down and actually create a road map. Views 3 isn't like Views 2 in the sense that there will be a rewrite. On the contrary, I'm really happy with the foundation of Views 2 and I believe that we have a solid system for building on. What I'm unhappy with are features that got left out, or that I didn't even know we would need.

Currently the Drupal pager system is an interesting look into some of the past decisions in Drupal design. The system is actually a very powerful paging system that can handle multiple pagers on the same page that act completely independently. However, it is also a kind of messy piece of code that stores a lot of its data in very obscure globals in formats that don't make sense. It is difficult to document and even more difficult to understand from the outside.

It's that time, and Panels 3 is finally getting close to beta. I have two major pieces of work to finish up (a proper preview widget and the upgrade path from Panels 5) and then I will release the first beta. I expect the first beta to be relatively unstable in terms of the features being buggy, but finally the API should be more or less stable, other than last minute fixes to get everything consistent with each other.

It seems I don't update this blog nearly as much as I once did, but as always, these things are cyclical. Soon enough I'll have both something to say, the time to say it, and the inspiration to put it into words. Until that time happens, however, I leave you this: Tomorrow morning I am going to DrupalCon DC. I have no presentations to give, this time, so for a change I am simply going as an attendee and more or less to be social. I'll be in the area for about a week after the con, so I won't be returning home until the 14th. Hopefully the place won't burn down in the meantime.

I'd like to compile a list of modules that use Views heavily (examples: Flag, Views Bulk Operations, Views Attach, Views Reference) with a blurb about each of them. The blurb would contain a neutral description of what they do, and then a non-neutral comment on the quality and maintenance level of the modules. Obviously the latter is a judgment call and I don't expect it to be completely dead on, but I would like to note projects that are well known to rarely get bugs fixed. Another comment might be known usage levels, some of which can be gleaned from the shiny new usage statistics.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to fly to New Orleans to enjoy a few days before the Do It With Drupal seminar, where I'll be speaking about Views and hoping not to embarass myself too much. And try to figure out how I'm going to get all the work done that I have to do before the end of the year. Still, I've never been to New Orleans, so it should be fun.

Completely by happenstance, I just discovered that they very first commit for Views was three years ago today. Technically Views is either a little older or a little younger than that, depending upon how you look at it; about a week before I had posted the code to a forum post on drupal.org to request comments, though the code itself was hosted on my server and that particular setup has long since been changed to something else.

Packt Publishing has recently been holding their annual CMS Awards which are determined by a combination of public voting and private judging. This year they introduced a new category, allowing community members from each CMS to vote for an "MVP" to honor those who the community believes should be recognized as providing the most valuable contributions to the project.

I can imagine that there were many choices in the voting, as we have a large community full of some very dedicated people who spend every day furthering the cause of Drupal, but at the end of the voting I was selected as Drupal's MVP, on the strength of the Views module combined with the other things I do. (Also mentioned here)

I am extremely honored to get this award, but I want to make sure that this does not diminish the hardworking contributions of dozens of others who make Drupal what it is. Everyone knows Dries Buytaert, of course, who has spent the last 7 or 8 years of his life making Drupal what it is and is looking to continue to do so as long as it remains viable. And everyone knows Angela Byron, AKA webchick, who was recently honored for her contributions and they are richly deserved! But there are also people like, and forgive me for dropping out an incomplete list, but Jeff Eaton, Karoly Negyesi, Derek Wright, Addison Berry, Greg Knaddison, Nathaniel Catchpole, Daniel Kudwien, Michelle Cox, Kieran Lal, Steven Peck, Gerhard Killesreiter, Narayan Newton and I could go on but I don't have all day to write this who are contributing a great deal of their time and energy into Drupal and their contributions are vital for the functioning of this ecosystem.

I'm honored to receive this award, but it's very important to remember that there isn't, really, a single Most Valuable Person in our community, but there are a lot of very valuable people in this community. I thank everyone who voted for me, and I thank everyone in the community who have made the way of life I currently lead even possible. Drupal is built upon the strength of this community, and I'm proud to be a part of it.