New to Drupal: Better Core Community

The biggest change in Drupal over the past year is not the Git migration or the release of Drupal 7, both of which were fantastic steps forward for Drupal. It’s the more inclusive developer community.

At DupalCon 2010 in San Francisco, there was a core developer’s summit. It was an invite-only pre-conference session for core developers to talk about the future of Durpal. This year’s DrupalCon, instead, featured a “core conversations” track during the conference. Somewhere between a BoF and regular session, it allowed anyone with an interest in the future of Drupal to join the discussion about what they find most interesting.

As someone who is a module maintainer, but not a core developer, I love this change. By removing some of the exclusivity surrounding working on core issues, Drupal makes it easier for future core contributors to ease their way into this elite developer community.

And just in time because, since the Git migration, anyone to contribute to Drupal. Not just answering questions in the forums – I’m talking about contributing code. Gone is the burdensome CVS account application process which required perspective developers to write an essay about their motivations, zip up their module or theme, post it to an  issue queue and wait.  And wait.  And wait…

Why the wait? Because it was equally burdensome for the application approvers to unpack, install and review the code. The laborious process rankled some developers used to free-for-all, wild-west style of other open source projects, but this deliberation ensured that code posted on drupal.org met a quality bar and did not duplicate the other efforts.

Now that the initial phase Git migration has completed, anyone with a drupal.org user account can build their own sandbox project. These project have everything a “full” project has: a home page, an issue queue and a Git repositor.  The only things missing are releases and, thus, support through the usual Drupal update mechanisms. Got an idea that maybe just might be something you think worthy of contributing? Build a sandbox project and post it. Invite folks to use it, enter bugs in the issue queue, suggest new features – in other words, use it as they would a “regular” module.

Rather than writing essays about motivations, developers can develop. And those that approve applications can see how a developer responds to bugs or feature request in their issue queue and review their individual check-ins. In other words, they can review if an applicant acts like a good developer and not on the quality of their prose.

To me this shows the willingness of the Drupal core community to increase their ranks. There are some who will raise concerns over lower quality contributions or more time spent by experienced core developers reviewing code rather than writing it. These are valid, but are outweighed by the benefit of a more inclusive community and more core developers means we can bring Drupal 8 to market better, stronger, faster.

The six-million dollar release, built for free by an even  bigger community.