Tony Mobily The founder of Drigg a popular set of modules for Drupal that allows anyone to build a digg like social news website has recently announced that he is leaving the project with immediate affect. What does this mean for users who have adopted the Drigg system and currently own websites and communities that utilize Drigg? and what does it mean for the actual Drigg project itself.

Back in late 2007 a lone programmer named Tony Mobily had become disillusioned and frustrated with the flawed Pligg system after using it for a social news project he was working on. Most of us without Tony’s coding skill set would simply have gave up the dream of owning a functioning digg like social news site but not Tony, Instead Tony decided to program one of the most impressive set of Drupal modules that was released in 2008 titled Drigg. Coding the Drigg set of modules initially took Tony hours upon hours of work by himself and 1000′s upon 1000′s of lines of code were specifically written for Drigg, the effort Tony placed into Drigg was and still is astonishing and very much appreciated by many.

With Drigg Tony brought a real competitor to the open source social news arena that’s features and potential expandability with other Drupal modules superseded any social new platform that had come before it. Back in January this year however Tony announced that he would be quitting coding for Drupal and handing the modules he has create over to other maintainers including the Drigg module. So what does this mean for users that have adopted drigg as their social news platform of choice and what does it mean for the drigg projects future as a whole.

Here is what Tony had to say about Drigg and his other modules futures.

As of now I am no longer a Drupal developer. I won’t abandon my modules and projects outright; I will keep on fixing bugs, for example. However, I won’t develop new features for my modules. Instead, I will be available to new developers who want to join the Drupal projects, and give them training and advice while they develop new features. Teaching is one of the things I will never tire of, and will be my next contribution to the Drupal community. I hope this will help create more developers, and will keep the modules I developed alive and active but as of now I have re-assessed my priorities.

Here at Social CMS Buzz we would like to take this opportunity to wish Tony all the best for the future and thank him for all his contributions to Drupal in the past.