Drupal Community

While Drupal itself is an extensible enterprise digital technology, the community behind Drupal is its true superpower. Effectively harnessing the community, its tools, and its practices helps any developer become better at Drupal. The community builds Drupal and contributes its experience and code to make Drupal better. Without a vast and healthy community, Drupal wouldn’t be what it is today. This chapter aims to help you better understand the community while stressing the importance of everyone contributing their experience to sustain and shape the Drupal project.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Understanding the open source community
• Projects on Drupal.org

Understanding the open-source community

Drupal’s biggest strength is the community behind it. Unlike proprietary software, which has developers paid to build and maintain it, Drupal leverages its active, open-source community. Understanding how to work with the community is critical to working with Drupal and to keeping it vibrant.

Drupal.org basics

Drupal.org is one of the primary places where the community engages. The following figure shows the initial Drupal.org landing page, which provides a high-level direction for those interested in Drupal:

Figure 4.1 – Drupal.org home page

The figure shows a lot of relevant information, starting with the top menu, which can help direct you to useful starting points. Why Drupal? and Solutions capture useful marketing materialfor different types of users in the community. Build helps direct community members toward projects and issue queues that help create Drupal applications. Community information...

Other community resources and tools

The Drupal community engages in other ways that help foster collaboration. Discussion commonly happens on Drupal Slack (drupal.org/slack). General and specific channels exist that are tied to getting help, specific projects, or specific topics that span both professional and social subjects. Drupal camps and conferences, most prominently the global conference known as DrupalCon, bring the community together through sessions, supported contributions, and social events. Some regions hold local events and meetups. Finally, community members routinely write blogs, engage in social networks, and join podcasts.

The Drupal Association is a US-based non-profit organization tasked with “uniting the global open source community to build, secure, and promote Drupal.” They run Drupal.org, maintain the project’s infrastructure, host DrupalCon, and lead strategic programs. While their responsibilities do not overlap with the vision of the...

Summary

This chapter covered a review of Drupal.org and provided an introduction to engaging with the community, working with community projects, and the purpose of the Drupal Association. All of these are important to effectively harness one of Drupal’s best assets: its community. The next chapter covers what is new in Drupal 10.