sirkitree.net //say it out loud, [sur-ki-tree]

Recently I was asked at work to start going through our current multisite platform and catalogue what modules are available for Drupal 6 in order to start our upgrade. One place that was immensely helpful: Contributed modules status - version 6.x.

One of the main modules that we use (Node Comment module) I realized was completely unmaintained and was on the semi-new Abandoned Modules list (see the discussion on the development list). Now I know we're going to need this so I requested maintainer-ship.

The first thing I did (in trying to be a good maintainer) is to familiarize myself with the module's issue queue and start hacking on some of the known bugs. After getting a feel for some of the things that were reportedly wrong with the module, I needed to familiarize myself with the code itself. I knew basically what the module did and pretty much knew how it worked, so I decided to first and foremost run it through the Coder Module and fix a few of the small warnings on some for the code formatting and fix those. Then I tackled some various other issues that seemed important and created a new release (DRUPAL-5--1-1). I wanted to list all of my commits when creating this release, so I found this nice little script (/me thanks merlinofchaos and dww) in contributions/tricks called cvs-release-notes.php that you can run within your modules checkout through php command line giving it the version FROM and TO that you want all your commit messages and it spits out some nicely formatted html to just paste into your new release's release notes. Try saying that five times fast!... Ok, it's not that hard.

Now that I have some bugs fixed and am very familiar with the code, I can now run it through Coder Module again to give me the recommended changes in converting it to 6. I'll start by creating a DRUPAL-6--1 branch (this is now required instead of creating just a DRUPAL-5) and any progress will be committed here.

If anyone has any other posts relating to good maintainer-ship practices, comment here!