Dries Buytaert

David Rothstein

I selected Angela "webchick" Byron as my co-maintainer for Drupal 7 back in DrupalCon Szeged in August 2008. Since then, together we shepherded efforts of 1,000 core contributors to create Drupal 7, got the release out the door in January of last year, and worked hard thereafter to stabilize Drupal 7, to the point that the number of Drupal 7 sites eclipsed the number of Drupal 6 sites earlier this year.

However, Angela's level of responsibility in the community has grown significantly in the past 3.5 years, and she wears many hats, from Drupal Association board member to code sprint planner to Drupal.org coordinator to evangelist to general community cat herder. We both felt that it was time to transition the role of Drupal 7 core co-maintainer off of her plate, in order to give her more time to focus on her other community roles.

When thinking about replacements for Angela, David Rothstein was at the top of my list. David was a key contributor to Drupal 7 and heavily involved in a wide range of issues throughout the code base. He was also on the Drupal Gardens team, developing against Drupal 7 while it was still in active development, and so has a very thorough and deep understanding of Drupal 7's internals. David is extremely conscientious and thorough in his reviews, and is incredibly calm and respectful in his communication style.

I'm thrilled to say that David accepted the invitation to join the core co-maintainer team, and will have time to work on managing Drupal 7 releases through community time provided by his current employer, Advomatic. David will not be committing to the Drupal 8 branch, but will be focused on guaranteeing the quality of Drupal 7.

Please join me in welcoming David to the core maintainer team!

Jennifer Hodgdon

As the Documentation Team lead, Jennifer "jhodgdon" Hodgdon has done a fantastic job of not only keeping Drupal core's API documentation high-quality and consistent, but also of on-boarding new Drupal core contributors through the "Novice" issue queue.

Since documentation improvement patches are always welcome, and since they are unlikely to break other parts of the system, I'm happy to announce the promotion of Jennifer as a Drupal core co-maintainer for version 7 and 8. Her responsibility will be solely around documentation and code style patches, plus occasional help on "emergency" commits such as a required rollback of an accidental patch commit in order to get our automated test suite passing again.

The hope is that delegating responsibility for documentation and code style patches to Jennifer will help increase the velocity of Drupal 8 development. Not only will documentation changes go in faster, it also allows catch, webchick and myself to focus our time on bigger patches.

Welcome to the core committer team, Jennifer! :-)

Nat "catch" Catchpole

I'm pleased to share that Nat "catch" Catchpole has accepted my invitation to become my Drupal 8 co-maintainer. For the duration of one release cycle, he will help me co-ordinate Drupal 8 development.

Nat has been working with Drupal for almost 6 years and is one of the top two contributors to Drupal 7 core. In addition to being is known in the community as an incredibly talented engineer with a passion for software design, Nat is also a driving force on performance and scalability efforts. Additionally, he pays careful attention to core development processes and how they can be improved. I firmly believe he is what Drupal core development needs right now.

One of the things that I like best about Nat, is that he doesn't like unnecessary complexity. I believe he will be a great help in driving architectural decisions, helping to improve the framework aspects of Drupal core, and saying no to cruft.

Nat is working out of Japan for Tag1 Consulting. Note that Nat will be traveling between 4th-22nd October, but will get set up as co-maintainer this week.

I'm extremely excited to work alongside Nat to set the direction for the next version of Drupal! Please make him feel welcome.

Angela "webchick" Byron

During my keynote presentation at DrupalCon Szeged this week, I announced that Angela "webchick" Byron will be my Drupal 7 co-maintainer. For the duration of one release cycle, she will help me coordinate Drupal 7 development.

The main reasons for electing webchick is her interest in usability, test-driven development and custom content types. Plus, she knows how to bring people on board and how to set them up for success. She is a massive asset for Drupal, and a role model of what a Drupal community member can be.

Photo credit: Chrys.

Gábor Hojtsy

Two months ago I invited Gábor Hojtsy to become a co-maintainer of Drupal 6, the next major Drupal version.

As of today, Gábor can commit patches to Drupal's development branch and for the duration of one release cycle, he will help Steven Wittens and myself to shape the face of the next Drupal version by identifying and coordinating interesting development efforts put forward by the Drupal community.

The main reasons for putting Gábor in this role include his work on localization and internationalization, his active involvement in the Hungarian Drupal community, his background with the PHP documentation team, and the consistent stream of high-quality contributions over time.

Having a dedicated maintainer for each major Drupal release has proven to be extremely valuable so I'm hopeful that this decision will be one of my best decisions in months.

Gerhard Killesreiter

At the same time I invited Neil Drumm to help Steven and myself out with the next Drupal version, I asked Gerhard Killesreiter to help with the day to day maintenance of the current Drupal version, Drupal 4.7. Having a dedicated maintainer who's task is to secure the stability of the Drupal 4.7 release series is going to be extremely valuable. I choose Gerhard because he has the kind of unspoken commitment that a father shows to his child. That and he is particularly skilled in saying "no, only bugfixes are allowed", and "what part of 'no' don't you understand?" in particular. So far, it's been one of my best decisions in months.

Neil Drumm

Two months ago I invited Neil Drumm to become a core committer of the next Drupal version. For the duration of one release cycle, Neil will help Steven Wittens and myself to shape the face of the next Drupal version by identifying and coordinating interesting development efforts. I haven't been very verbose about my choice of Neil, but I figured it would be a pretty good hint as what I'd like to see us work on. Not unsurprisingly, this went mostly unnoticed.

I picked Neil for two reasons. First and foremost, Neil doesn't like complexity. People tend to propose incomprehensibly complex solutions, and Neil has quite a knack for detecting attempts to get cruft into Drupal. Secondly, Neil has been the co-founder and maintainer of CivicSpace, the first Drupal distribution. In his role at CivicSpace, Neil has been actively involved with the development of an install system. I hope that in his new post, Neil will help coordinate the development of a cruft-free install, upgrade and dependency system for core.

It is needed to get custom content types in core and part of the larger goal to make Drupal easier to use and develop for.