Dave Reid

Note: this is a serious post, but I had to have a little fun and wanted to parody Barack Obama's 2009 State of the Union speech.

I've come here today not only to address the distinguished men and women in this great community, but to speak frankly and directly about everyone's favorite Drupal module, XML sitemap. I know that for many Drupalers reading right now, the state of the module is a concern. And rightly so. If you haven't been personally affected by this module, you probably know someone who has--a friend; a neighbor; a co-worker. But while the module's reputation may be weakened and our confidence shaken, tonight I want every Drupaler to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the XML sitemap module will emerge stronger than before.

So how did things get this bad?

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of using XML sitemap yet, I think Angie Byron (webchick) and Jeff Eaton said it best:

webchick: "Dear XMLSiteMap module: Please die. And not in that cute, friendly way. I mean I literally hope you get hit by a bus. Twice."
eaton: "Uhoh. Brainstorming a #drupal site assessment drinking game with @quicksketch ... "XMLSitemap? Finish your drink."

The last stable/official release of the module was the 5.x-1.6 version from almost a year ago. There is a 5.x-2.x version that was supposed to fix problems in 5.x-1.6. For over a year, the 6.x-1.x-dev version has been a work-in progress port of the unfinished 5.x-2.x version. Despite there not being any stable 6.x release, there are over 10,000 people using development builds which are buggy, frequently failed on updates, and could not scale to large sites. This of course, leads to several issues in the queue with over 200 replies with recurring themes of frustration and impatience.

Much like the current US/world recession, I can't assign blame to any one person or problem. The current maintainer, Kiam was very active and would keep hacking away at the module, fixing problems, but sometimes introducing new ones. For the 25th most popular Drupal module, there was a lack of regulation (peer code review) that we usually see in other popular or large modules. There was no way to say that a change won't work, or something is a bad idea until after the code had been changed. Some developers that needed a working module for their clients would take one look at the code and issue queue and would promptly run away, seeing no other short-term solution besides writing their own custom implementation. The people who's input and time could help the most did not need or want to help contribute back. Those who did make honest efforts were frustrated with language barriers or misunderstandings. There was no test coverage for the module, which I also can't blame since writing SimpleTests for an existing, largish module which you didn't originally write is really hard. But new features would be added and bugs would be fixed without ensuring that they would work correctly. Read more