We had a short discussion at yesterday's Spokane Drupal Group meeting about how to get connected with the wider Drupal community. So I thought I'd post a few ideas -- anyone with things to add, please do!
Finding out what's going on
Here are some ways to keep up with what's happening in the Drupal community.
- Subscribe to the Drupal Planet RSS news feed (an aggregation of 424 blogs from the Drupal community): http://drupal.org/planet (scroll to the bottom for the Subscribe link).
- Subscribe to the Drupal News RSS feed (posts that are shown on the front page of Drupal.org): http://drupal.org/news (scroll to the bottom for the subscribe link).
- Join groups of interest on groups.drupal.org (and make sure you're subscribed to notifications when new content is posted). To find groups, click on Groups in the top right navigation (http://groups.drupal.org/groups). To check your notification status, log in and click on My Account in the top right navigation, and then Notifications. If you have already joined a group but are not subscribed to email notifications and it is not listed on your Notifications list, the only way I know if to get subscribed is to leave the group and then rejoin (to do that, go to the group home page and click "My membership").
- Sign up for issue notifications on projects you are interested in. Much of the software development discussion happens on "issues" (which are bug reports and feature requests pertaining to Drupal Core, as well as contributed modules and themes you can download from Drupal.org). To sign up for issue notifications for a project, log in to Drupal.org, and click near the top where it says "Logged in as [your user name]". Then click Notifications. Near the bottom, enter the name of a project you'd like to follow, and choose your frequency of email notification. I also suggest making the default that you get email from issues that you have "followed" (meaning that you either created the issue, added a comment to the issue, or clicked the Follow button).
Getting involved in discussions and decisions
Decisions in the Drupal Community are made through a community process, where everyone's input is welcome (ideally and in most cases, anyway). If you want your input to be heard:
- Participate in discussions in topical groups on groups.drupal.org (see above for how to find/join/get notified).
- As I mentioned above, much software development discussion on bugs, features, and new direction happens on issue reports. So you can create issues to report bugs or request features in Drupal and modules/themes you downloaded from Drupal.org, or comment on existing issues. To create an issue, start by searching (in the project page's right sidebar, such as http://drupal.org/project/drupal for Drupal Core, or http://drupal.org/project/views for the Views module) to see if the issue has already been reported. If so, add to the discussion on that issue rather than starting a new one. You can also just click "Follow" to be notified when someone else comments on an issue of interest to you (when you add a comment, you will also be added to the "follow" list). Also see above for how to check your Drupal.org issue notification settings.
- Join IRC (Internet Relay Chat -- a real-time chatting system). Many real-time discussions about software development for Drupal and modules happens in the #drupal-contribute channel. Discussions about documentation happen in #drupal-docs, and we also have a friendly Pacific Northwest channel where you can ask questions to get help with Drupal, and get involved in planning regional events, at #drupal-pnw. To find out more about IRC, read the documentation section at http://drupal.org/irc, paying special attention to the "getting set up" page http://drupal.org/irc/setting-up and this page on setting up your chat software http://groups.drupal.org/node/2326