Dries Buytaert

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.