With the GitLab Acceleration Initiative, Drupal Association staff are working hard to streamline the contribution tools that the Drupal community uses, while preserving the essential spirit of our collaborative community.
We need your help. We're a small team, with limited resources, but with your financial support we can expand our team and move quickly to implement these changes that will help accelerate innovation in the Drupal community.
Why is this initiative so important?
Contribution is the backbone of any open source project. The Drupal ecosystem represents a multi-billion dollar industry of digital innovation, and that innovation is built using the tools provided by the Drupal Association on Drupal.org.
Today - contributors need to understand and learn an intense contribution toolset (bespoke) in order to contribute to Drupal. Someone who might be an accomplished developer and frequent contributor to other open source projects hosted on GitHub.com or GitLab.com might find the Drupal contribution process too cumbersome; becoming a lost opportunity to grow our community.
This bespoke tooling came about for a good reason: Drupal actually predates all of the tools that are commonly used in software development today: Git, Github, the Atlassian suite, GitLab, etc. This custom contribution infrastructure has powered all of the innovation that has brought Drupal to where it is today, but now is the time for us to grow and enhance the contributor experience making it fresh and familia, and empower the contributor community to innovate in a modern landscape.
What will it take to complete?
The good news is - we've already made great progress. Behind the scenes, all Drupal projects are already hosted on our own instance of GitLab. Users can use GitLab's WebIDE, third party GitLab integrations like GitPod (or Drupalpod!), and we've integrated key GitLab features into our existing issue queue.
While these efforts help bring great collaboration features to our existing community, our next body of work is about meeting those potential new contributors where they are.
We need to:
- Implement a modern authentication and single sign on system that allows users with existing accounts with tooling providers like GitHub and GitLab to sign up to contribute to Drupal in just one click.
- Adapt the contribution recognition tools that have made our community a leader in open source sustainability.
- Progressively enable more and more features, like GitLabCI, GitLab Pages, etc - phasing out the bespoke and aging versions of those tools that we use today.
We are simultaneously opening the doors to a world of new contributors, and also bringing our existing contributor base along for the journey -This is an effort that will take significant community engagement to reach the best outcome for the Drupal Community.
To learn more, check out our recent update from #Driesnote at DrupalCon Europe 2021:
How can you help?
Your financial support allows the Drupal Association to invest from in the expansion of the engineering team's capacity and the costs associated with accelerated migration to GitLab for the benefit of the Drupal Community.
If you would like to be recognized as a strategic partner by sponsoring this initiative, contact our partnerships team.
Interested in supporting the Drupal Association in other ways? Reach out to ashlee@association.drupal.org, Chief Development Officer.
