Effective ways to contribute to Drupal

Event: DrupalCamp Pune 2023

Drupal core contribution has the significant impact on your careers when you are a Drupal developer. When contributions are done in planned and constructive manner, it helps community. Spammy or incorrect contributions harms individual as well as organizations. In this session I am planning to cover various effective ways to contribute to Drupal that are quite effective and helps the community in a positive way.

In this session we are be discussing:

Types of contributions that one can do being a community member.
Effective ways to contribute to Drupal.
Simple tips to increase the contribution count (in a positive way)
How to ensure that you’re not gaming contribution credit system
Emphasis on learning rather than getting credits.

Transcript

1. Mohit Aghera Drupal Developer Effective ways to contribute to Drupal
2. I’m Mohit Aghera Who am I? Today I’ll cover: Drupal Developer @ PreviousNext. Drupal.org: mohit_aghera Twitter: mohit-rocks • Types of contributions that we can make • Things to keep in mind while doing contributions • Best practices for meaningful contributions
3. Established in early 2009 to provide full service consulting, design and development for large scale Drupal websites. Who is PreviousNext? Successfully delivered many Drupal based projects for Government, Higher Education, Media and Communications clients. Very experienced team with long term staff members. Strong contribution and involvement in the Drupal community.
4. Who have we worked with?
5. Why should I contribute❓❓ 🤔
6. Motivation for Contributions🏅🫶📈 • Reputation, recognition • Giving back to community • Personal growth, skill development • Solving problems and making an impact • Learning from peer review and feedback
7. What can you contribute to! 󰳕📄📦🧪 • Code Contributions • Documentation Contributions • User Support ◦ Support on forum ◦ Drupal stackexchange • Community Organizing • Event organising, Volunteering • Testing and Quality Assurance • Marketing • Mentoring • Translations
8. Effective ways to do code contributions
9. Find what motivates you 💡⚡ • Identify which part of core excites you the most • Emphasis on learning rather than getting credits • Contribute to specific sub-system
10. Benefits! • You’re less like to do low hanging contributions • More learning and exploring • Attain in-depth knowledge of Drupal core.
11. Avoid low hanging contributions 🌳 • Avoid creating empty forks for issues • Avoid the urge to re-roll issues • Put more focus on learning rather than credits • Avoid working on PHPCs issues
12. Re-rolling issues 🗞 • Perform re-roll “only” when required • Ensure that it doesn’t cause regression • Validate the existing test cases • Run “commit-code-check.sh” from “core/scripts” folder
13. Issue review guidelines 📝 • Follow the issue review guidelines here • Avoid reporting false RTBC issues • Add proper comments and perform code reviews
14. Initiative driven contribution🤝 󰞵 🙌 • Join core initiatives and be a part of it • Strategic initiatives vs community initiatives • Don’t just attend meetings, do the actual work on issues • Take ownership and accountability
15. Initiative driven contribution - Benefits • You don’t need to hunt issues 🕵 • Get good familiarity with certain part of core • Gain attention in the community 👀
16. Writing PHPUnit test cases 🧪 • Write test cases for the bugs and issues • Follow “Needs tests” tag
17. Testing and QA contributions ♿🧪 • Follow the issue testing guide • Accessibility testing ◦ Join #accessibility slack channel ◦ Be a part of the meetings and provide good inputs • Don’t RTBC any issue after testing it ◦ It might need code review as well. Just keep that in needs review
18. Documentation Contributions 📄📃 • Review module guides and contribute to documentation • Join #documentation channel on Drupal slack. • You can be the maintainer of certain documentation guides.
19. Event contributions 📦✈ • Event planner or organiser • Drupal Camp organiser • Drupal Meetup organiser • Be a part of session selection committees
20. Marketing contributions 🌏📈👕 • Collaborate with other marketing teams globally • Work on “Promote Drupal” initiative • Design Drupal swag • Develop marketing material and share with community
21. A quick recap.
22. Do’s and Don’ts ✅ • Use your time wisely • Do focused contributions • Find your niche and leverage that • Get into habit of contribution • Write meaningful comments when you fix something • Follow issue etiquettes guidelines • Collaborate and communicate ❌ • Don’t do spammy contributions • Stay away from PHPCs focussed contributions • Avoid unnecessary re-rolls • Avoid minor patches like info.yml changes • Don’t write comments using ChatGPT(seriously??) • Avoid random re-post of earlier patch • Don’t upload the screenshot of applied patches
23. Questions? Twitter @mohit-rocks Slack mohit_aghera on Drupal Slack
24. Other links and documentation • https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/docs/marketplace/abuse-of-the-contribution-credit-syst em About abuse of contribution credit system • https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/issues/issue-procedures-and-etiquette/issue-etique tte Issue etiquetes • https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/docs/marketplace/services-listing#s-standards-of-cond uct-once-listed Avoid credit farming • https://www.drupal.org/community/contributor-guide/contribution-areas • https://www.previousnext.com.au/blog/5-simple-tips-increase-your-drupal-contributions- without-gaming-system • https://opensource.com/article/23/3/positive-communication-open-source