There are more than 1 million Drupal sites actively in use across the globe. At least one in 40 websites that a typical internet user visits is likely to be built on Drupal - however, the Drupal project leads and the Drupal Association do not necessarily have a direct line of communication to each of these Drupal site owners.

While the Association can reach Drupal users and site owners who visit Drupal.org, attend DrupalCon, or follow one of our social channels, there are many more users who do not engage with the Drupal community outside of their own Drupal instance control panel.

This initiative seeks to change that by adding a channel for important project and association messaging directly in Drupal Core's admin interface. 

Scope

The feature proposal has already completed the core idea queue process, and the initial prototype of the Project Messaging in Core feature has already been built as a contributed module. This existing work currently needs to be transferred into a true core feature request issue with added test coverage and any additional changes requested by the core team.

The work then needs to be backported to Drupal 7, and possibly to Drupal 8 after discussion with core maintainers.

1. Full technical and security review of the existing prototype project.
2. Remediation of any identified issues.
3. Completion of test coverage. 
4. Shepherding through the process of getting feedback from the appropriate core maintainers. 
5. Implementing required feedback. 
6. Once committed - move on to backports:
   1. Backport to Drupal 7
   2. Shepherd through the approval process with Drupal 7 maintainers. 
7. Optionally - pending a discussion with core maintainers, consider porting to Drupal 8. 

Technical constraints and additional requirements

The chosen solution must meet the following additional technical constraints and requirements: 

• The solution must be built to appropriately aggregate the feed of messages from Drupal.org, in collaboration with the Drupal Association engineering team.
• The solution must be built according to core contribution standards. 

Vendor requirements

The Drupal Association will consider contracts from both individual developers and agencies.

An individual must: 

• Be a member of the Drupal Association
• Provide examples of their contributions to Drupal core, especially feature additions, rather than bug fixes.

An agency must: 

• Active Supporting Partner of the Drupal Association that qualifies for any level of the new Drupal Certified Partner Program
• Provide examples of their contributions to Drupal core, especially feature additions, rather than bug fixes.
• Provide a statement or link that reflects your organization's commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Other Considerations:

Please indicate if you’re willing to accept in-kind benefits if your bid comes in higher than our allocated budget. The cash portion of the budget should not exceed $30,000 USD.

The point person for this project at the Drupal Association is generally available between 4:00 PM - 11:00 PM UTC. We welcome global responses but we’d prefer meeting times to be within our standard business hours. We will make every effort to accommodate times outside of standard Pacific Time business hours.

Timeline

The project messaging feature has a hard deadline of October 1st, 2021 in order to be included in the last release of Drupal 9, and for a backported release to Drupal 7. Preference will be given to proposals that complete the work on a much shorter timeline in order to allow plenty of time for the core acceptance process.

Individuals or Agencies who intend to participate should provide their bids and samples of portfolio work to the Drupal Association via email (tim@association.drupal.org) no later than Friday, May 14th at 5pm U.S. Pacific. Respondents will be notified of the decision no later than June 15th.