The bliss of contributing to Drupal 9

Last weekend all of our employees were encouraged to take part in the Drupal 9 porting weekend. The event was organized to activate as many developers as possible to contribute to the open source project Drupal.

For us at 1xINTERNET it turned out to be a great experience. Feeling the team spirit both within the team and the Drupal community, deeply affected us as a group and on a personal level as well. We paused all client projects on Friday and started with a kickoff meeting, where we went over the days ahead and how we would proceed in updating all of our Drupal projects, supporting each other and anyone that needed help. Our goal, which we achieved, was to ensure that all modules maintained by our colleagues had a stable release. Also, our goal was that the modules we use most often, would also have the Drupal 9 readiness patches become ‘Reviewed and Tested by the Community’.

Everyone can be Makers of Open Source

In our kick-off meeting, we provided some mentoring to make sure that all our colleagues had the necessary knowledge to fully participate in this initiative. This included how to use the drupal.org issue queues, how to create patches, and how to efficiently start an environment capable of performing the necessary testing. Some of our colleagues opted to collaborate with their skills in other areas, helping to prepare for the upcoming launch of Drupal 9 in little more than a week.

We have a mix of people at 1xINTERNET, some of us were contributing for the first time and others are experienced experts, simply a great mix! 

The weekend highlights: 

• We worked on 46 different projects 
• We released Drupal 9-ready stable versions for 15 Drupal projects
• We enabled a couple of new contributors that contributed for the first time to Drupal
• Our non-coder employees worked on Celebrate Drupal 9 launch and content issues on drupal.org

João Ventura had previously agreed to help with the global contribution in Drupal’s #d9readiness Slack channel, so that issues could be better worked on by the Drupal community. His job was made a lot easier with the extensive documentation prepared in advance by Gábor and Kristen Pol.

We had a lot of fun and our team members loved it. Therefore we have decided to do this more often. We want to plan regular Contribution events at 1xINTERNET and also make sure that all employees participate in making Drupal better.

So, how was your weekend?