Source: Drupal Contributions Platform

DrupalCon North America 2021's main program starts tomorrow! Hope to see you in Hopin for the keynotes, sessions, BoFs, Expo Hall, Driesnote, Drupal Trivia, and more.

This year, instead of being only on Friday, Drupal contribution has been spread across the whole week. I'm excited about the new scheduling and hope to see you this week in the contribution areas. For those new to Drupal or new to contribution, I'd like to convince you that Drupal contribution is worth your time... starting with the contribution event is *free*!

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

If you use Drupal at all, you've probably already heard that 2021 is Drupal's 20th anniversary! Pretty cool. :) Check out wikipedia to see Drupal's initial release by Dries Buytaert was January 15, 2001.

In honor of Drupal's 20th year, DrupalFest is this month which is built around the popular DrupalCon North America event. Due to the pandemic, DrupalCon NA is online again this year, but this allows for a more unique content and contribution event model. The events are spread out throughout the month of April to allow for more participation and better integration into everyone's schedule. Hope to "see you" next week at DrupalCon or at one of the Drupal summits!

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

The Drupal project relies on the open source community for funding, promotion, and other contributions. As we know, contributing to open source can happen in numerous ways including code, testing, training, mentoring, organizing, speaking, and more. All genuine contributions are valuable.

One way we organize and make progress on the Drupal project is to create "initiatives" for important Drupal features or other focused tasks. You are likely familiar with some initiatives as they are highlighted regularly in the DrupalCon "Driesnotes".

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

I just started the process of preparing my Drupal 6 (!) site for migrating to Drupal 9. One of the first steps of my migration process was to figure out where to host my Drupal 9 site. Right now kristen.org is on Pantheon. Yes, Pantheon supports Drupal 6! Maybe they don't want me to advertise that though. :)

In this post, I'll discuss my initial impressions of surveying some of the biggest Drupal managed hosting companies. If your favorite hosting provider isn't covered here, let me know and I might do a follow up post.

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

In the last few months, I've been doing a lot of Drupal core contributions and, even though I've done plenty of contributions over the years, I've recently learned some new things when reviewing issues. I've made this cheat sheet for anyone who wants to help review Drupal issues and wants to make sure everything has been thoroughly checked before marking "RTBC" (Reviewed & tested by the community).

There is plenty of great documentation on the development contribution process that explains some of these items further which I've also linked to below. Documentation is also being improved right now so I will update this post as new information is available. For now, hopefully this post can serve as a handy reference.

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

DrupalCon Global 2020 is in a couple weeks and there are a lot of amazing sessions. Hope you can make it! While preparing my own DrupalCon Global session, I reviewed the other sessions and made a list of ones you might want to watch to help you prepare for upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 or 8 to Drupal 9.

In some cases, it was very hard to choose just one on a particular topic. For example, there are 3 great layout builder talks! So, while these are some of my top picks, don't forget to check out all the DrupalCon Global sessions and add your favorites to your schedule.

If you are upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and don't need to make any website improvements, then you can focus on the Drupal 9 sessions. If you will be doing a redesign and/or upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 9, check sessions for dreaming up your new site, planning your new site architecture, and implementing your new site.

I was researching Drupal 9 content and decided to collect some data. I gathered information related to the authors and the organizations whose content showed up in the top 100 Google results for "Drupal 9" (as of June 12, 2020). Check out the infographic with the data in a pretty format or skip to the plain text.

This is the first infographic I've created. I used Piktochart based on a Twitter recommendation from @akmalfikri. I liked the tool pretty well but was hoping for more mapping options based on region rather than country. If you have a favorite infographic tool, let me know.

As I'm sure you already know, Drupal 9.0.0 was released yesterday which was the result of thousands of people in the Drupal community coming together to make Drupal even more amazing. The release has a new Drupal 9 landing page and a Drupal 9 video that highlights the journey of Drupal and the Drupal community. We are truly better together.

You are also most certainly aware of the tragic killing of George Floyd as a result of police brutality and the resulting protests throughout the United States and other parts of the world. As an American, it sickens me to see how the Black community is treated in the US. Systemic racism is real and real change is needed urgently. Watching the peaceful protests throughout my country, I feel outrage, sadness, and hope.

Source: WYDAILY

For better or worse, I've been on Twitter a lot over the last couple months, and during the last couple weeks, it's been difficult to reconcile the content in my Twitter feed. Violence and anger and grief from yet another senseless tragedy in the Black community. Excitement and pride and joy from years of hard work on Drupal 9. I've struggled to take pleasure in the Drupal 9 release while watching the heartbreaking events unfold in the news.

I wanted to write a post about how amazing Drupal 9 is and how amazing the Drupal community is. Yet I'm preoccupied with thinking how I can make things better, how I can make the world better. Knowing many in the Drupal community, I am certain I am not alone with these thoughts and feelings. I did some research and have found some reactions from the Drupal community in light of recent events that I would like to highlight.

As you may have heard, Drupal 9 porting day a couple weeks ago was a huge success! Gábor Hojtsy wrote up a great summary on the event including all the money that was raised for the Drupal Association. And, you can read my porting day recap as well. Thanks again to all who helped out.

The April porting day was so successful that Surabhi Gokte and Gabriele Maira (gambry) encouraged Gábor to organize a repeat performance and, like magic, we have Drupal 9 porting weekend coming May 22 and 23. This is scheduled during the time we had hoped to contribute at DrupalCon Minneapolis. Now we'll join each other virtually in a few days to make Drupal even better.

The goal for Drupal 9 porting weekend is to make more Drupal 8 contributed projects (modules, themes, and distributions) compatible with Drupal 9. As of May 16, 2020, there are 1,617 out of 8,982 projects that already work on Drupal 9. So, during the porting weekend, we'll work on the 7,365 that don't. While that might seem like a daunting number, about half of those (3,405) likely only need a one-line change to make the project Drupal 9 compatible!

There is a wonderful effort underway right now to automate Drupal 9 compatibility issue and patch creation for contributed projects. Even with this effort, we still need your help during porting weekend. We hope you can participate!

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch

I've listed some useful Drupal 9 porting resources you can review and information about collaborating in Slack during the event. I've also added specific sections for preparation depending on the type of contribution you are hoping to do:

• I don't have time to prepare
• I'd just like to watch
• I'd like to mentor others
• I'd like to find and create issues
• I'd like to create and update patches
• I'd like to review patches
• I'd like to test patches

These are the steps I went through on "Drupal 9 porting day" on April 28, 2020, which was initiated by Drupal core "Initiative coordinator coordinator", Gábor Hojtsy. It was focused around timezones: Australia & New Zealand, Europe, and Americas.

Image credit: Aaron Deutsch