Hello everybody,
I'll give here some feedback about the organization of our first drupal learn sprint in accordance with the drupal ladder.
I've already posted some remarks about the content of the drupal ladder on the old group page : http://groups.drupal.org/node/227143 .
We were about 10 people, most of us are simply users and we have some developers : 2 drupal devs and one symfony dev.
To make the things easier, we've set up a local network with a DNS that pointed to a virtual machine so that people that do not have dev environments on their laptops can play the game simply via ssh .
The main problem we've encountered was when we talked about git, apart from the developers, all the others weren't really aware about what it is, we've gave I think too less time to explain how git works and we will rearrange that on our next session.
The second problem, was the issue list itself, not about the ladder one, but about a real issue page on 7.x core . Yeah, it is really difficult to have a quick way of seeing what is the state of an issue other than scrolling down the page and reading all the comments, btw we have shown how one of our dev has contributed to core and his patched was comitted to core, people eyes were shining, wow this man has contributed to core ! ;-)
The third problem now, is that people who are coming to our events for the first time are mostly waiting for free drupal formations :)
So now, we intend to give a complete session about git, because this is really mandatory to understand the basics of git for the people. Second, we would like to translate the ladder because once again, apart from the devs, the other ones do not really speak english. I don't know if there is the intention to make the ladder website multilingual or if we will install a ladder profile on our servers.
I think that having a team that will run issue sprints in an fluid way will take time, as we have events once a month. But the 10 people who were there are really interested in doing it so it is cool to make a community grow.
Regards,
Christophe
Comments
Thanks for the feedback,
Thanks for the feedback, Christophe. I spent some time thinking this over tonight.
Based on some of your comments, I wonder if you'd be better off scheduling a more focused event for the sprints. It sounds like you have a lot of attendees who don't know how to use Drupal, or aren't developers.
The Drupal letter initiative is really aimed toward getting more people involved in developing for core. There are certainly places that non-developers can help, but most of this work is to be done by developers. I don't know how well this program would really work for people who are not programmers. At the very least, one does need an understanding of version control systems, so it's pretty great that you are doing a session on git. However, it sounds like several of your attendees would be better served by Drupal training or using a training site like skillcompass.org.
Next, you mentioned problems with finding issues in the issue queue, or identifying what needs to be done for an issue. I think this is actually a really good place for inexperienced people to get involved in the issue queue. During the core mentoring hours on Tuesday/Wednesday, a couple people in IRC have been mentoring others in getting involved in the queue, and for a lot of people starting with some basic things like that: writing up new issue summaries to show at the top of that a given issue. This makes it easier for other people coming through behind them, like yourself, to get a quick overview of the status of the issue and what needs to be done. This might be a good activity for one of your meet ups: have everyone pick an issue, read through all the comments, and write up a succinct overview for the sake of anyone else who looks at that issue later.
I've given some more thought to the issue of translating the Ladder. While I'd certainly like to make it accessible to everyone, I realized that translating the Ladder might not actually be the best use of our limited available time. As I said before, the goal of this initiative is to get more people involved in developing for Drupal core. All development on the core, and all discussions thereof, take place in English: without a working understanding of the language, it's going to be very difficult for those people to get involved in core development. Obviously, this doesn't mean that one needs to be an English speaker to contribute to the community, but I'm not sure how to get non-English speakers involved in core development. Tools like Google Translate can help, but they're not bulletproof. I don't know, it's something to ponder.
Thanks for your reply, The
Thanks for your reply,
The issues summaries looks for me a good idea for non-developers people, I will really think about this.
We've also think to add some people in documentation translations, it is maybe not the goal of the drupal ladder but after our yesterday irc meeting, some people are interested.
In fact, after looking at the people, we do not have so much people that do not speak english, so we will arrange our 2people teams to always have on that does.
A question came btw from somebody yesterday, what about the D6 modules that still need to be upgraded to D7, is it the goal also to port them first to D8 and then backport to D7 ? I think this should be way to do.
We are mainly 3 developers in the group, one of each will be in a team. And for teams without devs, they will be focused on issues reproductions/confirmation and on issue summaries.
One question remains for me : Sometimes I see in the issue queue (whatever for 7 or 8), some issues that are not like people asking questions there. Can we automatically close the issue and forward the people to the forums ?
BTW, thanks for the initiative and hopefully the ladder distro will somewhat evolve.
Grtz
Christophe
Comments
That's a great idea! Never would have thought of that :-)
Contributed modules are upgraded by whoever maintains them. The ones that don't have a D7 version available by now probably won't ever get updated for D8, except in cases where someone else steps in to take of maintaining the module. The module in the Drupal core all get upgraded along with the core: some were dropped (and others added) during the 6 -> 7 upgrade, and the same will be true for 7 -> 8. When I referred to backporting fixes, I only meant things that are in D7 and will continue into D8.
No. When creating or editing an issue, you can choose a category, and one of them is Support Request. These questions fall under that, and can remain open until an answer is provided.