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Contributing to Drupal

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Drupal 7.0 is supposed to come out in a few hours, and Greg Knaddison has come out with his final 7.0 patch contributor statistics. I (jhodgdon) feel honored to be listed there as the #6 contributor of patches. Of course, there's a bit of meaninglessness in those statistics, since it's just counting the sheer number of patches, not the value of the patches -- I wrote and reviewed a lot of fairly small patches, mostly fixing the Drupal in-code documentation that is used to build the Drupal API reference site. But there are definitely a few meaty code patches buried in my statistics too, and in any case, I am proud of my contributions to improving the API reference documentation.

It's unfortunate that those statistics can't measure other important contributions to Drupal, such as writing and revising the on-line documentation, maintaining key contributed modules we all use to build Drupal sites, keeping the family of *.drupal.org sites up and running, and maintaining infrastructure modules used by Drupal contributors (API, Project et al, Coder, etc.). So I'd like to recognize those people as important contributors to Drupal 7 as well.

I also wanted to take a moment to suggest that everyone who uses Drupal consider contributing. The Contribute to Drupal section of Drupal.org lists 9 different ways that you can contribute -- as an open-source project, Drupal can use anyone's time and skills (or if those are lacking: money). As the Documentation Team co-leader, of course I think that contributing to Documentation is a great way to start out -- even if you can't write all that well in English, you can still do documentation reviews, or any number of other tasks.

I've also started on a personal resolution/campaign to review at least one Drupal patch a day in 2011, and write at least one Drupal patch a day. Both patch writing and patch reviewing are needed, which is why I decided to resolve to do both... So far, it's the 4th of January, and I've managed to keep on track for 4 days -- anyone care to join me?

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Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

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Evolving Web