Today’s guest post by Matt Westgate, CEO of Lullabot, is the next installment in our #DrupalCares series. My thanks to Matt and the Lullabots for sharing what the Drupal Association means to them.
It’s hard to believe that a little over a month ago, we were in DrupalCon planning mode. No one expected the Drupal community’s biggest event to come to a halt any more than we anticipated our lives totally changing due to a pandemic. While we’re all dealing with this new, and hopefully very temporary, normal, it’s more important than ever to keep things moving forward personally and professionally.
When it was clear that DrupalCon would most likely not happen this year, we decided to pledge our sponsorship dollars to the Drupal Association regardless of whether or not DrupalCon ended up taking place. We’ve been part of the Drupal community since the dawn of IRC, and many of our team members actively contribute to Drupal. We understood the financial hit that would occur by not having DrupalCon and because the Drupal Association has played such an important role in our business and the community, the decision seemed like a no-brainer. Let’s face it; the Drupal Association is the hub for Drupal success.
The Drupal Association is the conduit through which everyone on my team can contribute back to Drupal. They exist so we all can participate and receive the benefits of the community and the software. Simply put, there isn’t a Drupal without them.”
Matt Westgate, co-founder and CEO of Lullabot
It’s been incredibly inspiring to see so many of our fellow sponsors step forward as well. No doubt, we’re all in this together.But, there’s still more work to do. In order to continue project velocity, ensuring that we have adequate tooling, marketing Drupal, and many other activities that the Drupal Association helms, they needed to raise $500,000. Raising this amount is no easy feat, but we are almost there. We are committed to supporting this endeavor and hope you will be too.
[Editor’s note: As of publication the #DrupalCares campaign is 96% to goal!]
Lullabot Contributor Stories
Olivero Theme: Mike Herchel, Senior Front-end Developer & Putra Bonaccorsi, Technical Project Manager
The idea for the new front-end of Drupal 9 (Olivero) would not have happened without the Drupal Association. We serendipitously met up with Lauri Eskoka and Angie Byron at DrupalCon Seattle (which is put on by the Drupal Association), which led to the creation of the initiative.
Furthermore, the majority of Olivero’s development has taken place on Drupal.org, which is maintained by the Drupal Association. Without this tooling, development would be disparate and communication with the Drupal community (which is vital for this project) would be ineffective.
We were able to pitch our ideas for the redesign and development of a theme that could ship with the release of Drupal 9 by submitting our proposal to the Drupal Association’s “idea issue” queue. This ideas queue section of Drupal.org let us propose ideas for Drupal core and got them through validation and planning phases, which are a big part of the success of the Olivero project.
API-First Initiative: Mateu Aguiló Bosch, Senior Developer
The API-First initiative has been very thorough with automated testing. We have created comprehensive test coverage for all sorts of actions on all of the entity types defined in Drupal core. This allowed us to add features more soundly and eventually include JSON:API in core. The whole initiative would have been negatively impacted without the testing infrastructure provided by the Drupal Association to execute the tests and provide feedback in the issue queue.
Admin UI & JavaScript Modernization Initiative: Cristina Chumillas, Front-end Developer & Sally Young, Senior Technical Architect
The Admin UI & JavaScript Modernization Initiative idea started and evolved through several DrupalCons organized by the Drupal Association, where most of the main contributors were present. Also, drupal.org has been a key tool to move forward: the kick-off ideas issue queue was key, and Claro saw a huge increase in contributions when it moved to drupal.org. Using known tools by the community and the drupal.org credit system helped increase the project’s visibility.
Something else that made a huge difference on the design side was having the Drupal Association, especially Megan Sanicki, as the Drupal Association Director at that time, backing the design team as a legitimate group of the Drupal project to get free access to Figma. This online and real-time design tool has been a key factor allowing designers to be distributed across the world and timezones.