Migrating BeWelcome to Drupal

This is an overview of the project to migrate BeWelcome to Drupal.

The BeWelcome project was started late 2006, and it has gained considerable respect for the way it's run. Unfortunately so far this has not materialized into an big active member base. One possible underlying problem is probably the current code base, which takes an considerable amount of time and effort to get into, experience that is not directly usable on other projects. So the idea has risen several times to move to a platform that is

According to a survey among potential and actual BeWelcome developers, taken in October, there is considerable knowledge of Drupal, compared to Zend, Symfony and even the BW Rox framework itself. (The survey: File:BW developers survey 2010-10.pdf.)

This is a work in progress. You're very welcome to edit.

Migration

Main things to migrate:

• userprofiles (comments / relations / location (geodata) / groupmembership)
• messages
• preferences
• admin (backend)
• page-like content:
  • FAQ => faq content type (multicrud?)
  • tour =>
  • about pages

Other:

• forum
• groups
• wiki
• galleries
• blogs
• trips

User fields

• user/register should show more than username/password

Privacy

Waiting for D7 modules:

• CCK Private Fields?

Roles

• developer
• support
• editor
• translator
• admin
• forum moderator
• safetyteam

..

Translation

Drupal is based on "everything is English". We would prefer keyword-based translations. A solution would be creating another language: "real English" or something and rename "English" to "coder English" or "Drupal English".

Drupal can't show translation links, but it might be possible to create a module for that.

Deployment

• Deployment strategies. We want to have as much as possible to be code-based, but some modules really love the database and auto-increment.

Performance

• Page load speed
• Scalability

People

• guaka
• lemonhead
• Robin

Come work together on the 4th and 5th of December in Antwerpen.

Technicalities

Code driven development

• Features module for exporting stuff that lives in db into code
• Context module: works with features
• custom modules
  • sites/all/modules/custom
  • but we want to stick with mainstream modules as much as possible

Drupal 7

We have chosen to start right away with Drupal 7.

Con

• Many modules aren't ready yet.
• There are still some bugs.

Pro

• No need to upgrade to D7 ;)
• D7 has many good things in core that we want (such as user fields)

Questions, comments?

Please add it to the talk page...