development

tl;dr: Review the plan at the end directly.

Software has a changing nature; Drupal and its extensions are not the exception.
To be useful for a most of the users, those need to be on full releases, not only on the version control system; indeed the problem is not new and there is even a well-known phrase for one of its solutions: release early, release often
Therefore it is important to have a release plan.
Following after some context and reasoning, I propose a couple of practical guidelines on release schedule for contributed drupal extensions that I intend to use: release weekly until stable, then once a month following core shedule.

Vote Up/Down is a drupal module that uses Voting API to provide a way to vote.
These notes are about part of the history of the module, and the recent news about it, including a couple of releases!

In the last months I have been incrementally rewriting the scripts behind the stats I weekly publish about drupal core contributions.

This post is about some background on why and how it happened.

tldr; see conclusion below and the link above with produced data.

I have been writing about Drupal core statistics several times in the past, and incrementally, I have been automating the process of extract/sanitize contributors from commit messages and generating visualizations of the contributions.

The code is maintained on one of my drupal.org sandboxes, Drupal contribution analyzer, but I know, specially for the dependencies, that is not really trivial to run.

This time, instead of just presenting a new set of the statistics/visualizations output, I am glad to announce that I will be releasing a new version of the statistics and the visualizations once per week. In that way, the results will be available while I iterate on the code.

The site where the data will be available will be Drupal core contribution statistics website.

If you want to make any suggestion, please do it on the project's issue queue.

Following, one of the images generated, just to provide an idea of what is there.

I tried before to analyze the development of drupal history, and I end up creating a little project to actually track the scripts and other things I am using to do that.

Now that drupal 7.0 is out, I improve a little more those scripts named drupal contribution analyzer, and now I am uploading the results of that.

Sometime ago I posted about making a codeswarm video for drupal.

Since that time I was trying to improve it, and now I want to publish the new code(python prove me that it's rock solid faster :-p) and I also made some scripts to create lists of two interesting factors: activity by commits and by modified files. And, by the way, I generated tag clouds based on that info!

(for the impatient: look at the embed video at the end of the post)

codeswarm is a java project that let you process a version control system log(many are supported) to generate a video that try to make graphics about how the development has happened.