Brighton Drupal Inaugural Ladder Meetup - come learn how to contribute to Drupal 8 Core!

Posted by Anonymous on June 19, 2012 at 12:30pm

Start:

2012-07-02 19:00 - 21:00 Europe/London

Organizers:

guy_schneerson

Event type:

User group meeting

As Drupal’s popularity sky-rockets, so does the volume of issues and sense of urgency for problems to get solved fast. To keep up, we need to get more people contributing to core.

There are a lot of people who would like to contribute to Drupal core, but they’re not sure how, they don’t feel qualified, and the time commitment feels prohibitive. Meanwhile, as Drupal’s code base becomes more complex, the learning curve for contributing to Drupal core gets steeper.

To get more people contributing to core, we need to make it easier to work on core, and this is what the Drupal Ladder initiative is all about.

The first few steps are easy for anyone, minimal knowledge of Drupal required. As you ascend the ladder, taking any consecutive step up the ladder is within reach, as long as you’ve taken the first steps.

For each rung in the ladder, we’re providing clear instructions and goals that make it easy to get up and running with something new in 15-30 minutes. (This way, people can contribute in one-off 1- or 2-hour sittings and get real, valuable work done.)

Drupal groups meet regularly all around the world. If each group dedicates a few hours to making contributions and helping members work their way up the ladder, together we can close a ton of issues and bring more people into work on Drupal core.

If you're interested in learning more about Drupal and perhaps being able to contribute to core, come along on Monday 2nd July, 7-9pm at http://theskiff.org

For further details on the Drupal Ladder, please see:

http://drupalladder.org/

Comments

Some useful links to get you started

Posted by sphism on June 19, 2012 at 2:21pm

The only bit of that i disagree with is:

"Meanwhile, as Drupal’s code base becomes more complex, the learning curve for contributing to Drupal core gets steeper."

There are so many ways that you can help, even if you know nothing about git branches and applying patches (both of which are covered in the ladder and not so hard once you get the hang of it :)

A lot of the help which is need is basic project management. Making sure issue summaries are up to date for example... little jobs that no one really wants to do. It's not hugely glamorous, but it's very rewarding.

A really good way to get involved is to get onto IRC (i use colloquy software on mac) and get on the drupal irc channel. Often people go there and ask questions, ofter it's pretty easy to help someone out.

Here are all the drupal irc channels and help setting it up: http://drupal.org/irc

If you go onto drupal irc between 5-7pm on a wednesday afternoon (british summer time) then you'll be attending 'Drupal Core Office Hours', that's when a load of devs all focus on the issue queue at the same time, and help noobs get to grips with it all. You'll find a very supportive bunch there, who are all extremely grateful for the help. I usually start by saying hello to XJM, who then assigns me some work.

As steve mentioned the first few steps on the ladder are simple, just familiarise yourself with how the project operates

Here's a great post from Jacine about git and patches that i refer to often http://jacine.net/post/8419331209/patches

If you are gonna be reviewing patches then Dreditor makes it easy and lets you review code in your browser: http://drupal.org/project/dreditor

If you ever need to reroll a patch then XJM's blog post will help: http://xjm.drupalgardens.com/blog/rerolling-drupal-8-core-patches

But don't worry about any of this stuff. As I said before there's plenty of ways to get involved, even just posting your thoughts in the issue queues can be of use. You could always join the documentation team if you're not so much into the code... http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team

Drupal Developer : Brighton UK