Contributions - The Heart of Drupal

Contributions are the crux of any open source project and Drupal is no exception. The Drupal community is one of the best open source communities in the world and not to miss the slogan “Come for the Software, Stay for the Community” which shows how amazing Drupal Community is.

When I say Drupal community, it’s not just about Drupal developers, it’s a mix of people from all walks of life from all over the world: Developers, site builders, freelances, front end engineers, event organizers, business executives and Organizations etc,.

With great community come great contributions!

The contribution trend is changing rapidly, more and more people are contributing to Drupal. As of today, 3252 people have contributed to Drupal 8 Core from 1215 companies and 90 countries. Whereas around 954 people contributed to Drupal 7 Core. That is a 340% increase in the number of people who contributed to Drupal 8 Core compared to Drupal 7. That’s phenomenal growth. The change is not only from individuals, but more so from the organizations who work with Drupal. The organizations are now strongly encouraging and supporting their employees to contribute back to Drupal. The recent change to the Drupal.org marketplace listing (to highlight contributing organizations, which is now ordered based on the number of contributions by the organization) is an indication of how crucial contributions are to Drupal. Kudos to the efforts of Drupal Association, who are vital in making this happen.

So, How can you contribute?

The obvious way is to contribute to code; be it Core, contributed modules or a theme. Whenever you use Drupal, fix a bug, create a patch or add a new feature, which could be useful for others. These are perfect examples of contributions.

But, you don’t necessarily have to write code to contribute, you can help with improving documentation, testing a new version of Drupal or a module and creating an issue when something is not working as expected. Contributing a new feature of a module or theme, organizing events such as meetups, code sprints and camps, and even speaking and mentoring at conferences are few other ways one can contribute to Drupal.

With DrupalCon Asia being the first DrupalCon after the Drupal 8 release, Contributions will have its own track and the deadline for call for papers is just two weeks away! What are you waiting for ? Make sure to submit a session here. For more information on Contributions track and what kind of sessions we are expecting click here.

Submit a Contributions Session

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Chakrapani Reddivari
Contributions Track Chair
DrupalCon Asia