NYC Camp 2014 Features Roadmap

Background

Forest asked me to look at the current state of how COD is being overridden on the site - obviously it's a mess. As I understand it, we're a bit behind schedule because - due to the sensitivity around this year's venue - freedom to get others involved in the planning process was put on hold until last week. Please contribute to this wiki, so we can get the roadmap clarified as soon as possible.

Goals

We discussed some of the goals of the NYC Camp site, on it's own and as an implementation of COD:

1. The site's own requirements and what it does require (no payment for example)
2. To lead the way for other Drupal camp sites implementing COD
3. To help improve COD as a distribution by pushing changes upstream (to several branches - see the strategies section below)

Strategies

We also talked about several paths moving forward toward these goals, which can be addressed in priority, and some perhaps simultaneously:

1. Identify where the site's code has diverged / been customized from COD, and move these into more sustainable extendibles or overrides. [In-progress]
2. Proof of concept: new 7.x minor branch (7.x-2.x) of COD, which does not use Features module exportable components as part of the base distribution. This has become a pain point for many distributions, and NYC Camp has felt the burn as well. Any module used by COD which depends on certain components or configurations (content types, fields, variables etc) should have configurations for their functionality. This new minor branch could perhaps contain a demo feature - and/or a module that sets defaults on installation - but in either case, one which does not continue tracking these changes using features (that can be left up to each implementing site). [Not yet started]
3. Proof of concept: new 8.x branch of COD. This is not high on the agenda, because while it may be plausible to meet all current requirements for NYC Camp, it is not yet ready to meet common requirements of other Drupal camps (for instance, who require payment). Therefore it does not meet the second goal above. But it will be good to do sooner than later, so this can be a good parallel strategy even if lower in priority. [Not yet started]