The bliss of contributing to Drupal 9

Drupal 9
Planet Drupal
Drupal

Last weekend all of our employees were encouraged to take part in the Drupal 9 porting weekend. The event was organized to activate as many developers as possible to contribute to the open source project Drupal.

For us at 1xINTERNET it turned out to be a great experience. Feeling the team spirit both within the team and the Drupal community, deeply affected us as a group and on a personal level as well. We paused all client projects on Friday and started with a kickoff meeting, where we went over the days ahead and how we would proceed in updating all of our Drupal projects, supporting each other and anyone that needed help. Our goal, which we achieved, was to ensure that all modules maintained by our colleagues had a stable release. Also, our goal was that the modules we use most often, would also have the Drupal 9 readiness patches become ‘Reviewed and Tested by the Community’.

Everyone can be Makers of Open Source

In our kick-off meeting, we provided some mentoring to make sure that all our colleagues had the necessary knowledge to fully participate in this initiative. This included how to use the drupal.org issue queues, how to create patches, and how to efficiently start an environment capable of performing the necessary testing. Some of our colleagues opted to collaborate with their skills in other areas, helping to prepare for the upcoming launch of Drupal 9 in little more than a week.

We have a mix of people at 1xINTERNET, some of us were contributing for the first time and others are experienced experts, simply a great mix! 

The weekend highlights: 

  • We worked on 46 different projects 
  • We released Drupal 9-ready stable versions for 15 Drupal projects
  • We enabled a couple of new contributors that contributed for the first time to Drupal
  • Our non-coder employees worked on Celebrate Drupal 9 launch and content issues on drupal.org

João Ventura had previously agreed to help with the global contribution in Drupal’s #d9readiness Slack channel, so that issues could be better worked on by the Drupal community. His job was made a lot easier with the extensive documentation prepared in advance by Gábor and Kristen Pol.

We had a lot of fun and our team members loved it. Therefore we have decided to do this more often. We want to plan regular Contribution events at 1xINTERNET and also make sure that all employees participate in making Drupal better.

So, how was your weekend? 

Joao Ventura

This was an amazing event, thanks to Gábor and the rest of the mentoring leadership. The whole community was so energetic that you could see issues were being worked on just about every important module. At 1xINTERNET, our team collaborated on many of the modules we use and maintain, helping us to get closer to a Drupal 9 version of our distribution. I just want to send my thanks and hugs to the entire community!

João Ventura, Backend Development and DevOps

Adam Juran

“Attempting to port our version of Phase2's Particle  theme to Drupal 9, I encountered a huge blocker: Pattern Lab requires an NPM package that uses an older version of Twig for  template rendering which was causing a WSOD on every page! Unable to find a workaround, I once again reached out  through the community: I contacted Chris Bloom, author of Particle, who in turn tweeted to Evan Lovely, maintainer of the twig rendering package. Evan approved my pull request and now we are all one step closer to porting Drupal 9 themes that integrate Pattern Lab.”

 

Adam Juran, Frontend Development

Zsofi Major

"Friday morning I sat down with the same excitement I always have during live sprint days at conferences, and it was super cool to see the 1x Team preparations and even cooler to see the progress."

 

Zsofi Major -  Team member at 1xINTERNET

Hilmar aka Drupal Viking

"The Drupal Community showed it strength so well, where I was both being able to mentor and being mentored at the same time! We are stronger together!"

 

Hilmar Hallbjörnsson, Drupal Viking and Software Developer

Dorina Klein

"To start contributing is hard. I didn't know how to find issues and how to work on them. So I am grateful that Baddy led me and helped me to find issues, to start with contribution."

 

Dorina Klein, Projectmanager

Christoph Breidert

"It was a lot of fun to work only on contribution for two days. I could finish a lot of issues, participated in two releases, and could help a lot of things to get forward, that are relevant for 1xINTERNET"

Christoph Breidert - Managing Director at 1xINTERNET

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