Plan to throw one version away, you will, anyhow

I’m really excited about the upcoming Drupal 8.5 release at the beginning of 2018. In the Workflow Initiative our goal is to include, in core, the rewritten version of the Workspace module.

It’s been a long journey here, much longer than what I’ll be able to summarise in this short blog post. But the essence is, we spent a couple of years writing the first version in contrib space, and we learned a lot from that both about architecture and user experience. Then, we spent more time rewriting and improving the architecture based on that previous experience. This was the plan all along, because as Frederick Brooks writes in the The Mythical Man-Month:

Plan to throw one version away, you will, anyhow

The version of the Workspace module that will go into 8.5 will be very simple, and without a sophisticated user interface. We plan to expand and improve the user experience of the module in Drupal 8.6 that will be released around next summer.

If you want to play around with the version that’s going into 8.5, you can checkout the 8.x-2.x branch of the contrib module.

Big thanks to the entire initiative team for the persistence and endurance working through all of these big changes.