drupal

2017 has been incredible and a year of both personal and professional growth. Events like camps and conferences are critical for me to be active in the community, as I don’t have a local group or regional meetup. In 2017, I gave more presentations than I ever expected to. I travelled to many awesome cities. I had a personal goal of giving a keynote/featured talk. I ended up giving three. I went to many places I had never seen before (both at work and through community events). I’m astonished by how much effort and care volunteers put into these events. I shared meals, craft beers, and locally

SimplyTest.mePatrickD, the maintainer of SimplyTest.me, recently expressed interest in transitioning the application to a new maintainer. Let me first acknowledge how valuable this tool is for the community. It helps first time contributors who want to rapidly test a patch. It helps community members prototype modules or distributions without the concern of standing up a server. It’s really helped people, especially those not deeply technical, and should continue to as far as I’m concerned. I’ve used this at code sprints, I’ve tested patches on d.o, and generally point people to this in lieu

This terminology has never sat well with me. I haven't had the time really to articulate why. Allow me to explore my thoughts further. I fully recognize that people need to use the right tool for the right job. But, this philosophy suggests Drupal is not the right tool for less ambitious digital experiences. What about sites for local non profits, web presence for a local restaurant without any digital staff, or local religious organizations that desire a straight forward way to communicate their mission to the world on a shoestring budget. Drupal was built on the backs of people creating

Over the last few years, there have been substantial discussions around ReactJS, especially with regard to its former license. This has little to do with the fact that ReactJS offers an attractive and innovative front-end development framework and that it has the backing of a major commercial entity. While I'm not an expert, the most controversial bits do not appear to be driven by copyright concern, but how their license applies to patents. I've learned that legal and licensing can be a significant consideration in determining the technology we select on behalf of our clients, how

Component-based architectures have become both a popular and fairly crowded space in the Drupal community. For over a year, I have followed the progress of some tools created by those leveraging Pattern Lab as a component based design library. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of problems these individuals encountered, many of which are experienced technologists in our space. But, every solution I have seen has been complex and demonstrates some architectural red flags. I wanted to take a fresh look. I paid a designer to redesign my blog for a migration to Drupal 8. This presented the

In my earlier blog post, I researched community governance in other open source communities. While it was not exhaustive, I identified a set of trends and practices communities use to serve community members. The question remains: what can Drupal learn from other communities? To answer this question, we must understand where we are today. It turns out that answering this is quite difficult depending on our individual experience, network, and exposure to the community. Admittedly, with respect to Drupal’s governance, I am far from an expert. While I have been in the community for a while, I

In an earlier blog post, I described my ideal local environment for developing Drupal based projects (DrupalVM). My primary objectives included separation from the host OS, persistence in config (affording disposable sandboxes), and extensibility to customize around project specific configuration (mirroring other environments). In those respects, DrupalVM has spoiled me and I've likely saved hundreds of hours in large part to these efforts (thank you, Jeff and other contributors). Core development is a different story. Technically speaking, you need Composer, Git, and an environment mirroring

Something has been bothering me and I haven't been able to put my finger on it. I hesitated writing this. By doing so, I fully understand that some will choose to twist or misinterpret my words to further instill doubt into the community. While this is one's right and often turns into a lengthy Twitter debate, many in the community have shied away from sharing their voice for fear of retribution. As a community, we have accomplished great things not because we agree on everything, but because we know how to disagree without being disagreeable. We are capable of debate through issue queues

Jrockowitz's recent blog post on crowd sourcing, found here, sparked so many ideas for me. I wanted to discuss the most prominent idea in this blog post, the idea for a company that nurtures community contributions. Such a topic has often been on my mind and Jrockowitz post might have helped me to connect enough dots around this idea. Community members (especially maintainers) often volunteer their time and energy to community projects with little incentive aside from their will to do good. BackgroundBefore elaborating further, I think there are some key motivations to align. The first is

DrupalCon was a great way to connect with the community and gauge the pulse from recent events involving Crell. After writing blog posts, I engaged with many people to share thoughts and hear perspectives. One common question that came up: what do other communities do for governance? This motivated me to do some research of my own. I wanted to be better informed in discussions to know what other communities are doing in an effort to identify where our communal gaps might be. I am a firm believer that the Drupal community doesn’t need to “reinvent the wheel” or think we are “special snowflakes”