Four people wrap their hands around each others shoulders while looking at a sunset in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

We love making great websites, standing on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before us to make Drupal what it is today. Thousands of working hours from fantastic people around the world have gone into producing this digital experience platform. Many of those gave voluntarily for free, while many were directed by paying customers who gave back so the rest of us could benefit. Everyone stands to gain when innovation, graft and capacity are pooled together. All that functionality in your Drupal site has been written by a real person at some point, who considered it worth sharing with the world. That is only the tip of the iceberg too - there is an entire community behind Drupal and the ecosystem of contributed modules that can be added to it.

Do you recognise what you have in your site? It's easy to dwell on imperfections, but consider for a moment how every piece of your project has been produced by someone trying to make things possible, which weren't before. Would you like more of that? Would you like to help millions of users across the world do more too? All kinds of outfits use Drupal - non-profits, charities, educational institutions, public sector organisations as well as tiny companies and international enterprises. Here's an example of some amazing work another company has done with Drupal to help provide better health care in rural Rwanda:

It's incredible what can be done with Drupal! If we all seek to help improve it as a platform, rather than just taking from it, our websites & companies stand to gain, sure. But that way, we also allow those less fortunate than ourselves to benefit. If you already get a boost from what others have put into Drupal, could you give something back too?

We're proud of our regular habit of contributing fixes back to the Drupal modules that we use. We've been one of the top 30 organisations contributing to Drupal core itself for the last couple of years, and we've gone beyond code contributions to sponsor events and promote Drupal in our local communities. We've maintained major contrib projects, such as Aegir & Views data export. Wherever possible, we develop in a way that allows work to be re-used in future, hence our 'Doing Drupal right' tagline. We believe working for our clients and the community is the right way. 

You can help this mission, and the health of the Drupal project as a whole by joining with us. Whilst open source products may not cost anything, the work to create them does. It won't be sustainable, nor desirable, for Drupal only to be built by volunteers, or for funding to be left to 'everyone else'. You can even help shape the direction of Drupal by getting involved.

We very recently completed a release of the Language Hierarchy module for Drupal 8, because Julabo GmbH got in touch to sponsor that work after recognising our contribution to that project and our multilingual expertise. They needed to add functionality and expedite work on that project to use it on their own site. One of our own clients already used that project too ... now the rest of the Drupal community can benefit from what they have facilitated!

We would love for you to sponsor work on Drupal or contributed modules. Speak to your developer about this. We're making ourselves available for sponsored work for the community. Maybe your site relies on modules contributed by the community which don't quite work as you'd like - so we could fix that for you and everyone else out there who may have similar needs. Maybe your project has bespoke functionality that others could use if it were generalised? Sponsoring that kind of work is an opportunity to make it more robust for you too, and then others around the world may even pick it up to add improvements that you haven't even dreamed of yet. Perhaps we can help you meet accessibility requirements or accomplish those 'nice-to-have' features that you've had on a backlog, by expanding what Drupal's modules can do. Maybe that even qualifies as something you can use a community or R&D budget for!

Would you like to expand what Drupal and therefore your own website can do, whilst sharing that with the thousands of users who may never be in a position to dream of building such functionality? Get in touch with us to discuss sponsoring Drupal work. We can suggest specific areas needing work, or you might want to improve something closer to your heart. Over to you.

 

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

https://www.computerminds.co.uk/articles/sponsor-work-improve-drupal-us-all