Introduction

The purpose of this document is to summarize our ideas for the future direction of Acquia Drupal and collect your feedback.

In general, we imagine the Acquia Drupal distribution evolving in several different directions in future releases.  The general directions for this evolution are as follows:

1. General maintenance to keep up-to-date with Drupal core and contributed module development
2. Add more contributed modules when there is high demand by Acquia Drupal users
   
3. Add more high quality themes to give users more fully supported design choices
4. Add more default content types and default settings to accommodate commonly requested usage scenarios
   
5. Make substantial contributions to Drupal 7 to address rich text editor requirements, administrative UI improvements, and other usability improvements
   

General Maintenance

We intend to keep the Acquia Drupal distribution synchronized with updates to Drupal core and contributed modules as they become available.  We'll continue to work closely with core and module maintainers to contribute issues and patches on an ongoing basis.  We plan to release new versions of Acquia Drupal approximately every two weeks, with each release rolling up all changes that have been tested and validated during the prior engineering iteration.  In the case of critical security releases, we may offer interim releases on a cycle shorter than two weeks.

Modules

The goal of Acquia Drupal is to help you build a Drupal website quickly and make it easy to keep the site updated. We added several additional modules since the initial release of Acquia Drupal in September 2008 to give Acquia Drupal users more options when building a site. Our approach going forward is to consider adding modules in response to demand from Acquia Drupal users. If you want to see a specific module or functionality added to Acquia Drupal, please add a comment.

*NOTE REGARDING RICH TEXT EDITORS: There is no clear market share leader today, and supporting an editor is significant burden given the challenges of cross-browser compatibility and integration with Drupal input methods. It is likely that Drupal 7 will include a native editor that will become the long term choice.  We need customer and community feedback before proceeding on an interim solution.

Themes

Our goal in providing professional-grade themes in Acquia Drupal is to make Drupal more useful, usable, and desirable out of the box. We want first time Drupal sites to work great AND look great, and providing knockout themes in the distribution is a great way to do that.

We have included one new professional-grade theme, Acquia Marina, in the initial release of Acquia Drupal. Acquia Marina was developed under contract with our partner TopNotchThemes.  We recently added a second theme from TopNotchThemes, Acquia Slate, and hope to add more professional grade themes from TopNotchThemes and other theme providers over time.  We don't want to include an overwhelming number of themes, but we do want enough variety to provide excellent options for the most common Drupal use cases.

We have established the following draft criteria for themes included in Acqiua Drupal for your review and feedback:

1. The vendor providing the theme(s) must be a well-established business with a track record and future commitment to Drupal, Drupal themes, and the Drupal community.
2. The vendor providing the theme(s) must enter into a long term contract with Acquia that defines specific terms and conditions for marketing, maintenance, technical support, legal indemnification, etc.
3. All elements (PHP, HTML/CSS, artwork) of all themes delivered to Acquia for inclusion in Acquia Drupal must be licensed under the GNU Public License and pro-actively released and maintained by the vendor through Drupal.org.
   
4. The theme(s) must be visually differentiated from other themes included in Acquia Drupal.
   
5. The theme(s) must be of extremely high quality in both visual appearance, functionality, and underlying architecture.
6. The theme(s) must provide an excellent user experience when use in conjunction with all modules included in Acquia Drupal, including future releases.

We are actively seeking customer and community feedback on our general approach to themes, and on the selection criteria described above.  Please provide your feedback through comments below.

Default Content Types and Settings

It has occurred to us that the one of the first things people do when they install Drupal is start creating content.  Unfortunately, the content types that Drupal provides on initial install are quite limited. We are thinking that it might be useful to create a number of content types in advance, and allow users to activate them as part of the installation process.  Of course new content types can be added at any time after installation, and the content types provided can always be modified or added, but it seems like providing more options on initial installation would be helpful to many users.

Experienced users will often choose to start with minimalist installation and build from the ground up, and we want to support that method as well.  But even advanced users may appreciate the option to just turn on a few more existing content types if they were well thought-out and structured.

There are a few important constraints and caveats that we should mention here:

1. We are not interested in any suggestion or solution that forks Drupal core or does anything fork-like.  We want an approach that builds on Drupal 6 as is instead of taking it in a new direction.
   
2. Acquia Drupal needs to be able to meet the needs of both first time Drupal users and experienced veterans.  Any solution that feels too constraining or that will create extra work for experienced Drupal users is a problem.
3. We don't want hundreds of exotic content types - just the really common ones that show up again and again across many sites of the same category.
   

We would love to get your feedback in this area.  Which content types would you like to see out of the box in Drupal?  What would be the best method for providing these content types in the installation process? Do you have other suggestions for what we should do here?

Similar to the situation with content types, Drupal currently takes a minimalist approach to many settings.  This often presents a learning challenge to new users. 

Take for example user roles and permissions.  Many sites have a superadmin, a number of normal admins, a number of content contributors, a number of authenticated users, and anonymous users.  Would it be helpful to create these roles as part of the installation process and, depending on which content types are activated, assign reasonable permissions to the roles as a starting point?

Similarly, would it be useful to turn on site search, create a basic skeleton of menus and primary links, and configure other settings as part of the installation process?  It would seem that having an installation wizard that asks intelligent questions about how these things should be configure could help new users achieve a more useful initial installation of Drupal.

The same caveats apply here as mentioned for content types.  We would love to get your feedback.  Please let us know what you would like to see us do in this area.

Drupal 7 Contributions

Some of the areas we would like to improve will require long term work on Drupal in the form of contributions to Drupal 7 development.  We've already had Gabor working hard on foundational work for better rich text editor integration with Drupal.  We would like to also contribute improving the administrative user experience and in other general usability of Drupal.  We have a few other ideas, but we would like to hear your feedback on where you think Acquia can make the most positive impact on Drupal 7 development.  Let us know what you have in mind.  We can't promise we'll do everything asked, but we'll give every suggestion solid consideration.