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Drupal Community Update - July 2021

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Once more, we have a selection of updates from across the Drupal community detailing the work they have been doing and ways in which you can contribute. This month, we speak with members of:

  • Promote Drupal
  • Easy out of the Box
  • Event Organizers Working Group
  • New Front-End Theme
  • Drupal Diversity & Inclusion
  • Drupal 10 Readiness

If you think you have something useful to add to any of these teams, please speak with the linked representative or the Drupal Association Community Liaison, Rachel Lawson.

Promote Drupal, by Suzanne Dergacheva

What have been your priorities in the last three months?

Setting up committees to work on specific aspects of marketing Drupal.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

We have three enthusiastic groups of volunteers meeting regularly to work on: the evaluator experience, promoting Drupal to developers outside the Drupal community and producing better marketing materials and campaigns around Drupal's strategic initiatives. Each group has defined a set of achievable goals and started the discovery phase of our work.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

It's a challenge to narrow down the work to be done because promoting Drupal is such a significant task. It's also a challenge to find iterative ways of improving Drupal.org given its scope and diverse audiences.

Easy out of the Box, by AmyJune Hineline

What have been your priorities in the last three months?

Since DrupalCon we have been actively recruiting contributors with the goal of having consistent contributors who can help on a regular basis. Having consistent contributors will really help move the issues forward.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

Since DrupalCon, having Jessica Laila step in and create weekly meeting agendas and then facilitate the meetings in Slack has been huge. I have been promoting EOOTB to contribution day coordinators and as a result, we are going to have space at several upcoming camps to move issues along and introduce the initiative to more contributors.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

Time. Or the illusion of time.

We also have some issues that have little or nothing to do with code. There is a need for a wider demographic of contributors (designers, accessibility consultants, marketers). We would love to have some folks for ideation on some roadmaps, as well as some marketing folks to help us with promotion copy.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

The first step would be to check out our weekly meeting in Slack. We meet in Slack on Mondays at 9am PT | Noon ET | 16:00 UTC.
The roadmap is located here: https://www.drupal.org/project/ideas/issues/3191533

Emilie Nouveau and I have the privilege of presenting a session detailing the initiative at DrupalCamp Colorado. If folks are not familiar with the EOOTB initiative they should check out the session and come to the contribution day to get onboarded.
DrupalCamp Colorado is August 6-8, with a contribution event that Sunday.
https://2021.drupalcampcolorado.org/

Event Organizers Working Group, by John Picozzi

What have been your priorities in the last three months?

Building awareness around the new events page on Drupal.org and prompting Event organizers to add their events. Our EOWG initiative leads have also been working to gain momentum on their specific initiatives. You can find out more about those at https://www.drupal.org/node/3200470

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

The improvements to https://www.drupal.org/community/events have been a great success and the group is working to keep the changes coming. We also have also made great progress with our On-boarding and Events website starter kit efforts.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

Time! The EOWG is a dedicated and talented group, however, all members have other (external) responsibilities that require their attention. These responsibilities prevent members from being able to devote as much time as they can to the EOWG.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

Sure!

We're always open to new members, so if you're interested (and have time) please join our Slack and send us a message!

Also, to get involved folks can learn more about the work we are doing at https://www.drupal.org/node/3200470 and reach out to any of the EOWG members with questions.

New Front-End Theme, by Mike Herchel

What have been your priorities in the last three months?

Reaching stability and becoming the default.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

We are SO close to becoming stable now. We have all known stable blocking accessibility issues (save for a number of auditing tasks), and all known stable-blocking bugs fixed. We're almost done with our technical debt issues, including getting some major work on automated tests committed just yesterday.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

We were hoping to reach stable by 9.2, but there were too many other things going on in core to make that happen. Automated testing was a real beast to get in, and had to be re-written more than once (special thanks to Brian Perry, and Matt Glaman for a lot of that work).

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

We're at the point now where we need a lot of testing. Please use the theme and let us know if you find issues :)

Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, by Tearyne D. Almendariz

What have been your priorities in the last three months?

In April I became the new leader of the DDI initiative. While it's a great honor, it's a big change to transition from being a contributor and sideline supporter to being the lead! Thankfully, I've had plenty of support from members of the community and previous leaders in the initiative.

My main priority as DDI lead is to foster a stronger culture of collaboration, support, and problem-solving. Marginalized people in the Drupal community and those who support them face a variety of challenges, and I believe the best way to tackle those challenges is through sustainable practices, supportive systems, and reproducible procedures. We’re also taking a solutions-based approach to the feedback we receive and ask ourselves the following:

  • Are we the best entity to address this concern? Is there anyone who can assist with their resources and expertise?
  • How can we best address this issue? Do previous solutions exist?
  • Is there a way we can empower someone to bring about their own solution, with our help if needed?

As part of our efforts to have more sustainable practices, we've changed the cadence of our meetings, shifting to an every other Thursday format. This gives community contributors and leads time and space to work on initiative work before the next meeting while having an opportunity to check in on progress.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

Our shift to a bi-weekly meeting cadence has given contributors a lot more breathing room and collaboration time than our previous pace, and we've seen an improvement to volunteer-life balance as a result. We’re able to spend more time working on solutions and forward progress. We’ve also been able to reschedule and launch the CFP and registration for DDI Camp -- the new dates will be 13-14 August!

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

Many of our contributors have been going through life transitions, and while our new meeting pace has helped, it's still been rough at times. The team continues to be supportive of one another in our efforts and acknowledge that we are humans and volunteers and that caring for and taking time for yourself is often the best way to give back to your community. We’re in this together.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

As mentioned earlier, Drupal Diversity & Inclusion Camp will now be held 13-14 August.

To learn more about DDI Camp, please visit https://www.drupaldiversity.com/initiatives/ddi-camp-2021
If you'd like to register for DDI camp, you can register at Eventbrite at https://bit.ly/ddi-camp
If you’re interested in speaking at DDI Camp, you can submit a session on Sessionize at https://sessionize.com/ddi-camp/

Please spread the word about this event! If you can, please nominate two people you know from marginalized or underrepresented backgrounds who would be great speakers for the event.

If you’d like to speak and you’re not sure, feel free to reach out to us! You can do both in the #ddi-session-help or #diversity-inclusion channels on the Drupal Slack

Finally, a big challenge we'd like to tackle is including more members of our international community in our efforts. We received feedback that at times the Drupal community (including us!) can come off as very US-centric, and we are doing our best to broaden our awareness and to do better. If you are a non-US-based member of the Drupal community and you have 5-10 hours a month to help us, please get in touch with us! We’d love your input.

Drupal 10 Readiness, by xjm

What have been your priorities in the last three months?

  1. We presented an Initiative Keynote on Drupal 10 to introduce the community to all the work that is underway.
  2. Our most critical priority remains the development of a CKEditor 5 integration module for Drupal core. We can’t release Drupal 10 without this upgrade, and CKEditor 4 is as different from CKEditor 5 as Drupal 7 is from Drupal 8. We are working closely with CKSource to make the upgrade possible.
  3. Drupal Rector has been very important for the Drupal 8 to 9 upgrade by covering the majority of changes to make to contributed projects and custom code. The tool was recently updated to the latest Rector library and work is underway to support Drupal 9. Soon work on covering APIs deprecated for removal in Drupal 10 can start.
  4. Upgrade Status now supports running on Drupal 9 and checks environment conditions against the proposed Drupal 10 platform requirements, alongside checking for deprecated API use. Drupal 10 readiness results of contributed projects is available on the Drupal 10 Deprecation Status Tracker.
  5. We continue to work on reducing our reliance on legacy jQuery code, especially for dependencies like jQuery UI, Joyride, and Backbone that are not actively maintained anymore. We're also building upon the Decoupled Menus Initiative's work on Standalone JavaScript Packages to provide modern replacements for legacy dependencies.

And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?

Drupal 9.2.0 has recently been released. Drupal 10 is being built in Drupal 9, just as Drupal 9 was built in Drupal 8, so there are many Drupal 10 compatibility improvements in Drupal 9.2. Some highlights:

We also added a new experimental Starterkit theme generator to Drupal core, although this is not available in 9.2 due to its alpha stability. The Starterkit theme generator will allow us to deprecate legacy base themes and will provide a better default experience for building Drupal themes in the future.

What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?

We had really hoped to have a beta experimental version of the CKEditor 5 integration module in Drupal 9.2 to get wider testing, but we were unable to complete the requirements in time. Instead, we plan to create a beta-stability release of the CKEditor 5 contributed module so that it is available for testing earlier than Drupal 9.3.0.

Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?

We sure do! Test and give us feedback on the CKEditor 5 contributed module and the experimental Starterkit theme generator. We need your help to make sure these are on track to become stable in time for Drupal 9.3. Also, it is critically important to create Drupal-9-compatible releases of contributed modules so that sites can update to Drupal 9. Drupal 8 will be end-of-life in four months, and sites and modules can't be made forward-compatible with Drupal 10 if they're not compatible with Drupal 9! Join us in the #d10readiness channel in Drupal Slack. Initiative meetings are held every other Monday at 18:00 UTC, with threads open for 24 hours for contributors in all timezones.

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