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Mediacurrent: Contrib Half Hour updates for 2019

Just over a year ago I decided to repurpose an internal contrib-focused meeting and make an open meeting to support contributing to Drupal, called the Contrib Half Hour. Along the way we moved its time a little later to avoid conflicting with another important community initiative and then restructured it to add focused meetings for certain topics. To make things even better, almost all meetings have been recorded and uploaded to our Youtube channel. 2019 is going to see some additional changes that I’m excited to start on.

Our Q&A have issues

Throughout the year it became apparent that there was a huge overlap between the Q&A meetings, where we’d focus on general questions and discussions from the community, and the issues lab, where we’d focus on specific drupal.org project issues. While there’s definitely a case for both, the overlap became somewhat naturally as the Q&A days had us often look at Drupal issues.

As a result of this we’re going to combine the Q&A and Issues Lab days into one that’ll be more open ended, letting us focus on general discussions some days and specific issues other days.

The testing shall continue until code improves

We’re also continuing our dedication to helping people learn how to write code tests for their modules and themes. While during 2018 we focused on functional testing for Drupal 7 and 8, I’m aiming to expand our coverage (ba-dum-dum) in 2019 to also include unit testing.

I’d also like to open an invitation for folks to join our testing lab who are starting to write tests to join our labs where we’ll be able to help.

Upgrade Lab: Time to upgrade

It was announced late last year that Drupal 9 will be released in June 2020 and that Drupal 7 and 8 will reach their end-of-life in November 2021. The main driving factor behind these dates is that the various libraries Drupal 7 and 8 depend upon will all have reached their end-of-life in November 2021 and so will no longer receive security updates from their respective maintainers. To avoid needing to come up with a plan to provide security coverage for a huge number of out-of-date 3rd party libraries, the Drupal core maintainers are dropping support when the other libraries also stop being supported.

It was also revealed that the usual upgrade anxiety for major releases of Drupal (5 to 6, 6 to 7, etc) would not be the case for Drupal 9. The plan is two release Drupal 9.0.0 and the final minor release of Drupal 8 on the same day, with the only difference being that all deprecated D8 APIs are removed from D9. As a result it will be relatively easy to upgrade from Drupal 8 to 9, “just” update all contrib code and custom code to no longer use the deprecated APIs along the way, and in theory everything should just work.

With this in mind we think it’s time for people running Drupal 6 and 7 sites to start looking to upgrade to Drupal 8. Towards that goal we’re going to have a regular meeting where we look at the steps to upgrade a site to Drupal 8 using the bundled Migrate system. We’ll look at what’s involved, how it works, how to plan for it, and how to help contributed modules support Drupal 8’s upgrade solution. I’m intending that we’ll be able to collaborate on improving both core and contrib’s upgrade functionality, and in so doing help all sites looking to upgrade. I’m also hoping that we might be able to provide some assistance to folks attempting custom upgrades using Migrate’s APIs, but we’ll see how it goes.

Schedule

Our schedule for the next few months looks like this:

  • January 3: Q&A
  • January 10: Turning custom code into OSS
  • January 17: Q & A & Issues
  • January 24: Testing Lab
  • January 31: Upgrade Lab
  • February 7: Presentation TBD
  • February 14: Q & A & Issues
  • February 21: Testing Lab
  • February 28: Upgrade Lab
  • March 7: Presentation TBD
  • March 14: Q & A & Issues
  • March 21: Testing Lab
  • March 28: No meeting
  • April 4: Upgrade Lab
  • April 11: Presentation TBD
  • April 18: Q & A & Issues
  • April 25: Testing Lab
  • May 2: Upgrade Lab
  • May 9: Presentation TBD
  • May 16: Q & A & Issues
  • May 23: Testing Lab
  • May 30: Upgrade Lab

Same Bat Time!

We’re going to continue meetings at the same time each month, using the same video conferencing provider:

And remember, if you’re not able to join us then you can always catch up later as all meetings are recorded, when I don’t forget to hit the record button that is.

See you then!