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Recently, I had the privilege of interacting with a few of the most decorated and remarkable members of the Drupal community - who also happen to be Drupal’s top contributors. I questioned them about the reason(s) behind them contributing to Drupal and what do they do to make a difference. Their responses were incredible, honest and unfeigned.
I use Drupal every day and my career in the last years are focused to it, so I want to work with something that I feel comfortable and that meets my needs. If I find errors or something that can be done in a better way in projects I´m using or in the Drupal Core, I open an issue in the project queue and if I have the knowledge and the time, I create a patch for it. This is a way I can says THANKS to the Drupal community.
The strength of Drupal is the community and the contributes modules you can use to create your project, one person can’t create and maintain all the modules you will need, but if several of us give ourselves the task of doing it, all will be more easy, and is not just code, we need documentation, we need examples, translations and many other things in the community, the only way to do this is if each of the Drupal user give at least a small contribution to the community. So, when I contribute to Drupal, I’m helping you to have time to contribute to something that I may need in the future.
I maintain many Drupal modules, so basically the main contributions are create, update and migrate Drupal modules, but I contribute too in other areas. I contribute translating Drupal to the Spanish language and moderating the user translations, I create patches for some projects I do not maintain, sometimes I review some patches in the issue queue, I write and update modules documentation, I make some contributions creating tests for Drupal modules, I give support to the community in the Slack channels and in the Drupal Stack-exchange site and help new contributors to learn how to contribute projects to Drupal in the correct way. And as I’m a former teacher, I participate in regional Drupal events promoting how and why is important to contribute to Drupal projects and how to do it.
I will love to maintain a Drupal core module but I don’t know if I will have the time to do it, so for the moment I will continue migrating to Drupal 8, evolving and having up to date the modules I maintain.
Contributing to open source is not just a good and healthy habit for the communities. It is also a healthy habit for your own projects and your self-improvement. Contributing validates your knowledge opening your knowledge to everyone else. So you can get feedback that helps yourself to improve, and also ensures that your project is taking the right direction. For example when patching other contributed modules with fixes or improvements.
I enjoy writing code. My main contributions have been always on that direction. Although more recently I have been also helping on other tasks, like Spanish translations in Drupal 8 Umami.
One of the reasons why I contribute to Drupal is to make Drupal more known in my area, get more people involved, attract new users, etc. I do my bit in contributing to the Drupal project by organising events like Drupal Europe and Drupal Camps in Germany and Icelan
Unlike many other projects the Drupal community tries to create a sustainable environment. Both from the technical site, but probably on the long run more important from the community side. Initiatives like Drupal Diversity & Inclusion lead the foundation for a project which won't just go away like many others
Contributing to open source software provides me with an endless collaborative challenge. My professional livelihood is tied to the success of Drupal which inspires me to give something back to the Drupal community. Contributing to Drupal also provides me with an intellectual and social hobby where I get to interact with new people every day.
Everyone has a personal groove/style for building software. After 20 years of writing software, I have come to accept that I like working towards a single goal/project, which is the Webform module for Drupal 8. At the same time, I also have learned that building open source software is more than just contributing code; it is about supporting and creating a community around the code. Supporting the Drupal community has led to also write documentation, blog about Drupal, Webform, and sustainability, present at conferences, and address the bigger picture around building and maintaining software
I feel that I should give back to ensure the tools I use keep working. Monetarily or with my time. And with Drupal it’s a bit of both:
I started submitting patches for the Twig initiative for Drupal core, then mentoring and talks at DrupalCons and camps, followed by some contrib patches, then offered to co-maintain some commerce modules, which snowballed into more and more contrib module co-maintaining, mostly for ones I use at work.
I pay the Drupal Association individual membership to help the teams for all the Drupal.orgwork and event work they do.
I guess, I like fixing stuff, I like to code a bit in my spare time, I like to contribute to Drupal, and as a freelancer, it’s good to be visible in the community.
Lately I’ve actually been feeling a bit demotivated. I’ve been contributing to core a bit, but it’s always an uphill struggle getting beyond an initial patch. I maintain a few contrib modules, and my Drupal Code Builder tool as well.
Being able to pull so many awesome modules for free really makes the work we all do in building good solutions for our customers a lot easier. This system doesn’t work without some of us putting things (code/time/blogposts/…) back into it. The Drupal community has given me a lot of things unrelated to just the software as well (really awesome friends, a better job, the ability to travel all over Europe, etc.). To enable others that come after me to have a similar experience, I think that it is important to give back, as long as it fits in the schedule.
Most of my contributions are under the form of code. I try to do some mentoring but while that is a lot more effective, it is really hard and I’m not that great at it, yet. I’m mostly interested in the Search API ecosystem because that’s what I got roped in to when I started contributing. A lot of my core contributions are for blockers (of blockers of blockers) for things that we need. I try to focus a little bit on the Facets module, since that is what I’m responsible for, but it’s not always easy or the most fun to do. Especially since I’ve still not built a Drupal 8 site with facets on it.
Community. That’s what motivates me to contribute. The feeling I get when someone uses your code or module or theme is great. Which is a good drive to motivate for more contributions. Drupal being an open-source software, it is where it is just of the contributions by thousands of contributors. So, when we use Drupal it is our responsibility to contribute back to the software to make it even better for a wider reach
Apart from contributing modules, theme & distributions I help in organising local meetups in Bangalore and mentoring new developers to contribute and begin their contribution journey from the root level. This gives me immense pleasure when I can help someone to introduce to the world of Drupal and make them understand about the importance of contributions and community. Going forward, I would definitely strive towards introducing Drupal to students giving them a career choice and bring in more members to the Drupal community.
My main motivation has always been improving what I use - first OS contribution before my Drupal days was a bug-fix for an abandoned at the time project that was impairing my Modding of TES-III Morrowind ;). I like the challenges and benefits of working in a community. Code reviews both that I've done and those done on my code have been incredibly important to my growth as a developer. I also have used it as a portfolio/career advancement method, although that is important it is only of tertiary importance to me. Seeing a test go green or a getting confirmation that a bug is fixed is incredibly satisfying to me personally. Also, I believe if you use an open source project especially professionally, contributing back is the right thing.
My level of contributions vary a fair bit depending on my personal and professional level of busy, but mostly through contrib module maintenance/patch submissions. Also in the last year or so, I've been getting into a lot more mentorship roles - both in my new company and within the broader community. Restarted my local Drupal meetup and am doing presentations there regularly.
Contribution for me is, at least partly, a selfish act. I have learned so much from some of the best people in the industry, simply by following along and helping where I can. I have also built up an amazing network of people who, because they know I help others, are more prepared to help me when I need it. Both code and other ways of contributing. I’m occasionally in the Drupal core issue queues, I help mentor others and I get involved in community issues.
My first motivation to contribute to the Drupal community is helping others that have the same requirement as mine. To be honest, I get very happy when someone uses my community code in their projects. I'm glad to know that I'm helping people. When I'm developing a new feature I check if my solution can be useful to other projects and that way I create my code using a generic way. - Usually, I'm the first to reuse the code several times. I think this is important to make Drupal a powerful and collaborative framework. I liked my first experience using the framework because for each requirement of my project, Drupal has a solution. I think contributing to the community is important for that. More and more new people are going to use the framework, and consequently new contributors, and in that way, it becomes increasingly powerful and efficient. An example of this is the Drupal Security Team, where they work hard to ensure that Drupal is a secure framework. I'm making contributions at the same time I delivery projects. Today I write my code in a generic way, that is, the code can be reused in other times. A good example of this model is the Janrain Connect project. This project is official in the community (contrib project) and my team and I work hard using 100% of the generic code, so we can reuse this code on other cases.
When we need to make some improvement in the code, the first point is checking a way to make this improvement using a generic solution. Using this approach we can help our project and help the community. In this way, we are contributing to making an organized and agile framework. The goal is that other people don't need to re-write code. It is a way of transforming the framework into a collaborative model.
My motivation comes from several sources: First off, I just like programming, and while fixing bugs, writing tests or giving support isn’t always fun, a lot of the time working on my modules is. It’s just one of my hobbies in that regard. Then, with my modules running on more than 100,000 sites (based on the report), there’s both a sense of accomplishment and responsibility – I feel proud in providing functionality for so many sites, and while, as a volunteer, I don’t feel directly responsible for them, I still want to help improve them where I can, take away pain points and ensure they keep running. And lastly, having a popular, well-maintained module is also the base of my business as a freelancer: it not only provides marketing for my abilities, but also the very market of users who want customizations. So, maintaining and improving my modules is also, indirectly, important for my income, even though the vast majority of my contributed work is unpaid.
Apart from participating in coding standards discussions, I almost exclusively contribute by maintaining my modules (and, increasingly rarely, adding new ones) – fixing bugs, adding features, answering support requests, etc. I sometimes also provide patches for other modules, but generally only when I’m paid to do so. (“My modules” being Search API and its add-on modules Database Search, Autocomplete, Saved Searches and, for D7 only, Solr, Pages, Location and Multi-Index Searches.)
And Lastly....
It’s not just brands that have adopted Drupal as their CMS – they are the cream of brands. From NASA to the Emmy Awards. From Harvard University to eBay. From Twitter to the New York State. These brands have various reasons to choose Drupal as their Content Management System. Drupal’s adaptability to any business process, advanced UX and UI capabilities for an interactive and personalized experience, load-time optimization functionalities, easy content authoring and management, high-security standards, the API-first architecture and so much more!
The major reason why Drupal is being accepted and endorsed by more than a million websites today is because Drupal is always ahead of the curve. Especially since Drupal adopted a continuous innovation model wherein updated versions are released every 6-months with seamless upgrade paths. All of this is possible because of the proactive and ever-evolving Drupal community. The goals for their contributions may vary - from optimizing projects for personal/professional success to creating an impact on others or simply to gain more experience. Either way, they are making a difference and taking Drupal to the next level every time they contribute. Thanks to all the contributors who are making Drupal a better place.
I’d like to end with an excerpt from Dries - “It’s really the Drupal community and not so much the software that makes the Drupal project what it is. So fostering the Drupal community is actually more important than just managing the code base.”
Warmly thanking all the mentioned contributors for helping me put this article together.