Looking back

Three years ago on Christmas day, I tagged the first alpha of the YAML Form module, which became the Webform module for Drupal 8. Looking back, it has been a great learning experience building and maintaining the Webform module. Looking forward, I want to make sure the Webform module is as stable as possible while still trying to smooth out any rough edges around accessibility and user experience. Everyone should feel that the Webform module is a stable, supported, and maintained part of Drupal’s ecosystem of contributed modules. To help organizations and individuals understand what to expect from a stable release of the Webform module, it’s worth defining some general goals.

Setting goals

The goals of this blog post and the overall stability of the Webform module are to…

• Define the ongoing stable release cycle.

• Document what to expect from stable releases.

• Encourage the growth of Webform add-ons and integrations.

Tagging releases

For the past three years, I’ve been tagging a new release at the beginning of each month. Frequently monthly releases were quickly followed up with a hotfix release to address unexpected regressions. Regressions happen because the Webform module is a feature-rich application with maybe not enough test coverage and definitely not enough eyeballs reviewing the code. Quality assurance is a challenge for open source projects; reviewing code for free is not as much fun as writing it. Even Drupal core needs help with improving the reliability of minor updates.

For example, Webform 8.x-5.1 was released at the…Read More