Early announcement of sympal distro

I originally posted this on the Drupal Consultants mailinglist, but thought it might be nice to put on the web.

I am still working furiously on the Sympal distro (formerly known as DrupalCOM). 100% aimed at (savvy) consultants (IE those not afraid to learn some minor PHP and use the Command line). I am still running after HEAD, and expect to release the first version soon after the 4.7 release (whenever that may be.... :) ).

Features:

• views.module
• image.module
• simplenews.module
• sections.module
• dashboard.module (not sure, only if we manage to use this while still be able to avoid PHP pages)
• prototype.module (the developers API toolbox for prototype/scriptaculous AJAX support)
• (and all of core, minus a few crufty modules, if CVS lets me do that easily)
• A lot of code generation and management scripts.
• A commandline installation script system (multisite environments only) fully integratable in your provisioning system
• the_site_name_custom_blocks.module (To put the PHP blocks for that client)
• the_site_name_custom_views.module (To put the custom PHP for views)
• the_site_name_custom_pages.module (To paste your custom PHP pages)
• microcontent.module (blocks are nodes, mission and footer and all are nodes and blocks too, thus finer grained access and simpler editing for your clients)
• wireframe theme
• admin theme
• the_site_name theme

My problem is mostly time. I really want to get this rolling, but I really lack the time to take a lead on a team of (volunteers) or something alike. If you are interested, I would love it if you take some time to look at Sympal_scripts (in Drupal CVS contributions/tricks) and file extra scripts for that into CVS. Mainly I am looking for postinstall.d/create_users.php and preinstall.d/create_database.php. But I am sure you have more and better ideas. Another thing you can test and improve is the microcontent, for that is a main part of the distro too. It tries to pull all sorts of content that we hide in the administration to the user- and moderator-space.

The philosophy is «Sympal for developers. Developers for the users» Meaning you do all the administration, all the development and configuration. Your users/clients should theoretically not even need to have admin rights....

The idea is all based on the agile development methods in Ruby on Rails: You invoke a commandline script. That generates code for you. For example path/to/scripts/generate_node.

PHP simplenode news newsitems will add a modules/news/news.module that allows users to add "newsitems" built after a "template module" called "simple" (story rip-off). And it will add a themes/the_site_name/node-news.tpl.php (obviously the_site_name is replaced by acmeinc_com for example)