So far, 2016 has been a great year for Drupal and Drupalize.Me. We started off as our own company, and we’ve been heads-down on lots of new Drupal 8 tutorials. We have a deep love for Drupal and the community around here—so in addition to working hard at our business, we encourage each other to roll up our sleeves in the wider community as well. Here’s a little rundown of what’s been on our team’s radar recently.
Migrate
Upgrading to Drupal 8 is on a lot of people’s minds, especially as the Drupal 8.1 release nears. With Drupal 8 we no longer have the old upgrade script method, but we’ve moved to a whole new framework for migrating your content. The basic pieces made it into Drupal 8.0, but there is still a lot of work to make this sweet new process function well for everyone. We’ve been working on creating tutorials for how to migrate to Drupal 8 and we realize there is more work than documentation needed—not everything is working smoothly yet. Upgrading is a big sticking point for many people in the Drupal world, so we decided to go a step further and bring someone in who can help improve the migration process itself. Will has been helping with tickets for Migrate-related issues (core and contributed), but we know that there is someone out there with a lot more expertise in this area: Mike Ryan, the creator and maintainer of the original Migrate module, and one of the maintainers of the core migration system in Drupal 8.
While core Drupal 8.1 is largely in good shape, there are some contributed tools which really make the core functionality more useful, notably Migrate Tools and Migrate Plus. Volunteer time is a hard thing to protect, so we’re paying Mike to focus his time to polish off some of the highest priority issues with these modules, as well as move a few remaining core patches that we’d all love to see go in. We’re also making sure that Will has protected time at work to help Mike by working on patches and doing reviews. The faster we can get Drupal 8 migrations working well, the better it will be for everyone in the Drupal world. We’re excited that we have the opportunity to work with Mike and give a strong push on this.
Drupal 8 User Guide
In the documentation side of things, Joe’s been plugging away on the Drupal 8 User Guide project, which he helped get off the ground about a year ago at DrupalCon Los Angeles, and has been working on intermittently ever since. They’re super close to completing the first draft of the content and will be moving into testing and editing after that. Last we checked, 95 out of 101 pages had been completed! This project is a great fit for us because of how much it overlaps with the work Joe's doing at Drupalize.Me to create tutorials, especially given our focus on improving Drupal by developing quality educational materials, both free and paid. Joe’s been able to take ideas from Drupalize.Me and incorporate them into the user guide, and vice versa, and that’s been beneficial to both projects.
Events
Outside of code and documentation, we also love some quality time with people! There are a ton of events happening all over the world (check out http://www.drupical.com for ones near you). Here are the ones we’re involved with right now.
DrupalCon New Orleans
Coming up in May, the North American DrupalCon is in New Orleans, Louisiana. What an amazing city! We’re super excited that our whole team will be there. We have a few things cooking there:
Amber and Joe will be presenting on a few different topics. Amber has a cool session called “Beyond the Blink: Add Drupal to Your IoT Playground” where you can find out all about using Drupal with physical things, with blinking lights and more! Joe will be running around with 2 sessions. The first dives into “Altering, Extending, and Enhancing Drupal 8” where you’ll explore hooks, plugins, events, and services. He will also be talking more about the user guide we mentioned above, and other changes to how the Drupal community maintains our documentation on Drupal.org in “Documentation Is Getting An Overhaul”.
Will and Blake have signed up to be mentors for the Friday sprint day, so you can run into them helping people out at the Mentored Core Sprint and the First Time Sprinter Workshop.
While we’re talking about DrupalCon, you should also check out the workshop “D8 & Symfony: Dive Into the Core Concepts that Make Each Fly”, with our partners at KnpUniversity. If you want some hands-on training with the internals of Drupal 8, this is the way to go!
Of course we’ll be around all week, meeting old friends, making new friends and taking in the atmosphere of NOLA. If you see us around, please stop and say “Hi!”
DrupalCamp Guadalajara
Joe is a pretty busy guy and was honored to be asked to keynote at DrupalCamp Guadalajara in Mexico. He’ll be there this coming weekend (April 7-9) to talk more about the Drupal community, chat with the local community, and eat lots of yummy food.
Twin Cities DrupalCamp
Joe and Andrew are both on the camp planning team, helping to organize the 2016 Twin Cities DrupalCamp. Joe has helped with the camp in some capacity or another every year that it’s been held, and this is Andrew’s second time diving in. This time around Joe is helping with the programming committee: responsible for setting a schedule, a theme, recruiting speakers, setting up pre-camp training and more. This year the committee has been focusing on including a new Higher Education summit on the first day of camp since it’s going to be held at the University of MN, and also thinking about ways we can mix things up a bit and intersperse some more un-conference style activities into the traditional session tracks.
Andrew is leading the sponsor committee, which focuses on wrangling former/new sponsors. (Shameless plug: If you want to sponsor the camp, please contact [email protected], and he’ll follow up.) We might be a bit biased, but Twin Cities DrupalCamp is the best camp in the entire world, and you should attend!
Portland Meetups
Not all events we jump into are camps. As part of her general involvement with the Portland Drupal User Group, Amber has been helping organize the local meetups—yes, there is not just one, but 3 different groups currently running on a monthly basis. If you’re in the Portland area you will likely run into Amber for sure.
Well, that wraps up a whole lot of fun stuff that we’re excited about. I hope that by sharing about our experiences, you can see that there are many ways to be involved, and meet new friends, in our community. What kinds of things are you involved in? If you need help getting started with the community in some way, please feel free to reach out to us and we’ll help you figure out a good way to dig in.
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