So we challenged ourselves to contribute back to the Drupal community this year. How are we doing? Here's a simple update on what each of us has done so far. Hopefully we'll see other ComputerMinds team members join this list by the end of the year.
Christian Sanders
You may have noticed Christian's recent article on updating jQuery. That work included producing patches to Drupal core itself and the jquery_update project. Christian has also pushed for user interface improvements in paragraphs (which I hope to implement later this year).
James Silver
James updated a patch for using tokens in webform components. He continues to own a whole 17 (yes, 17!) sandbox projects on drupal.org.
James Williams (me!)
I've already written in more detail on my recent contribution to the XML sitemap project and to recommend sponsoring contributions. The Drupal 8 release of the Language Hierarchy project was my first sponsored contribution, and since then I've made it available for Drupal 9 as well. I've started answering support requests in Drupal slack on a semi-regular basis, but otherwise most of my contributions are still around code. Here's a summary:
- Produced new patches for Drupal core (to support images in RSS feeds), blockreference, entity revision cache, entity_translation, file_entity, webform_validation and XML sitemap.
- Reviewed or progressed existing patches for Drupal core's file, filter, image and link modules. Also for the paragraphs (that was epic!), git_deploy, redirect and stage_file_proxy contrib projects.
- Wrote my first draft change record for core, for if Drupal core starts supporting language fallbacks for URL aliases.
- Reported a possible bug in the Drupal composer scaffold.
- Helped out a little in issues queues across all kinds of projects - anything from Drupal core to the GDPR project.
Mike Dixon
Even our head 'mind still gets in on the act. He has reported and solved a bug in the schema.org metadata module (used for SEO) and is helpful when he can to respond to support requests for modules that we use. And as the boss, we should be grateful that he encourages us all to use some of our company time to give back to the Drupal world!
Nathan Page
We kicked off this challenge with Nathan's dive down the rabbit hole, and before long Nathan had even dabbled in reviewing and producing patches for Drupal core. I'd say that was the aim of the challenge: to grow as developers and encourage others to help the Drupal project - so I think we can safely say, 'mission accomplished'. Nathan has since moved onto pastures new (Hi Nathan if you're reading this!), but we're delighted to see his contributions have continued.
Steven Jones
Perhaps our biggest all-time contributor to Drupal, Steven has continued to provide brilliant contributions. I consider him my mentor in this field, and I'm not the only one. Some of his contributions are to the infrastructure that some of us use with Drupal. For example, making Valet+ support Drupal sites better. Here's a summary of how he's helped out on drupal.org so far this year:
- As a module maintainer, Steven produced new releases of imageapi_optimize (and related projects for CLI tools, reSmush.it, & TinyPNG), entity_decorator and entity_revision_cache.
- Reviewed patches for Drupal 7 core's PHP 7.4 compatibility (in not just one but two issues for its base system) and CSS file handling, as well as to its comment, image and field UI modules.
- Progressed various contrib project issues (reporting, patching, or reviewing), including for Pathauto i18n, Shibboleth Authentication and views_index_hint.
Stephen Tweeddale
Steve's chief contribution this year is actually outside of the Drupal ecosystem - he has continued to maintain a plugin for GatsbyJS sites: gatsby-source-git. This uses a git repository as a source for pages to go into a static Gatsby site, just like the regular one for Markdown files within a site. (Did you know ComputerMinds do GatsbyJS, not just Drupal?!) The two systems are being used together on more and more projects nowadays, so I think it's only fair on Steve to include this here ;-)
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We're proud of all this! We've been involved with sorting a couple of security issues in contrib modules too, which are rightly kept secret. Of course there's plenty of scope to do more, especially by giving more of our time to help out beyond code.
Why not join us in taking on this challenge, to make a contribution to Drupal every month this year? Good luck! Let us know how you get on in the comments below.