Select members of the Drupal Association team have just returned from a wonderful DrupalCon Amsterdam. The revival of the European DrupalCon was a tremendous success, and we want to thank all of the volunteers and sponsors who made it possible.
The content at the conference was great as well. This year the core initiative leads provided a comprehensive update, followed by the traditional #Driesnote the next day, which laid out the vision for Drupal 9's key initiatives moving forward. The DA also shared an update from the Drupal Association board, held a community town hall, and provided our bi-annual update from the engineering team.
While DrupalCon was action-packed, we also moved forward a lot of other initiatives on the community's behalf in October.
Project News
Reminder: Drupal 8.8.0 is coming soon! 
Drupal 8.8.0-beta1 was released in early November, to be followed by the full release in early December. A variety of great features are landing in version 8.8.0, including improved Composer support in core, an updated Media Library, and updates to JSON:API. This is likely to be the last minor release before the simultaneous release of Drupal 8.9.0 and Drupal 9.0.0 next June.
If you want to help ensure a smooth release, we invite you to join the Drupal Minor Release beta testing program.
Time to get ready for Drupal 9
The time is now to get ready for Drupal 9. At DrupalCon Amsterdam the core initiative team put out the call for the community at large to get ready.
If you are a site owner, the best way you can get ready is to make sure you're up to date on the latest version of Drupal 8. From there, it'll be an easy upgrade to 9.
If you maintain a community module, or your own custom modules, you may have some work to do. Many contributed or even custom modules only need a one-line change to be ready for Drupal 9. Check yours using: the upgrade status module, or the Drupal Check command line tool.
Drupal.org Update
Automatic Updates Initiative needs your help!
For the last year we've been working together with the European Commission to bring automatic updates to Drupal. The first phase of this work covers updates for Drupal Core only, and only in non-Composer scenarios, but even so it should be able to protect many Drupal 8 and especially Drupal 7 site owners.
The module is ready for testing now. Your feedback is welcome to help us make this first phase stable for production use by the community.
You can also help by supporting Phase 2 of this initiative, which will include more advanced features like support for Composer-based sites, database updates, and a robust roll-back capability. We're looking for sponsors for this next round of work now.
Forming a Contribution Recognition Committee
The Drupal Association's contribution credit system is an industry first in open source, and so we want to take great care on each step on this new journey.
During the conference we also announced the formation of a Contribution Recognition Committee to govern the contribution credit algorithm which weights the order of the Drupal services marketplace on drupal.org.
We are now seeking applications from community members who would like to sit on the committee.
When will we enable GitLab merge requests?
When we migrated Drupal.org's git repositories to GitLab, it was the first step on the road to modernizing and improving the project's collaboration tools. The most significant step in that journey will be enabling merge requests, and we know it's a feature that the community has been waiting for.
So what's the hold up?
There are a few factors that have held us back from enabling the feature sooner. First, we were waiting for the GitLab team to add support for Git object de-duplication. Beta support for this feature was added in GitLab version 12.0, and then enabled by default beginning with the release of GitLab version 12.1.
While waiting for these features, the Drupal Association engineering team focused on other major commitments: moving forward the Automatic Updates initiative, in partnership with the European commission, co-leading the Composer Initiative to improve support in Drupal core, and preparing Drupal.org to support the release of Drupal 9.
While these other initiatives have overtaken much of our internal capacity, we're hoping to get back to the merge request feature very soon, and we're just as excited to release the feature as you are to begin using it!
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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who make it possible for us to work on these projects. In particular, we want to thank:
- Zyxware - Renewing Signature Supporting Partner
- EPAM - Renewing Premium Supporting Partner
- Datadog - Premium Technology Supporter
- KWALL - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
- ANNAI - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
- SymSoft - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
- Forum One - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
- Catalyst IT - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
- Old Moon Digital - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
- Authorize.Net - *NEW* Classic Technology Supporter
- SiteGround - Renewing Classic Hosting Supporter
If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association.
Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra