Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By leighcan on
The December Community Spotlight is on Damien McKenna(damienmckenna), a long-time Drupal contributor with over 2,000 code commits. Damien is currently the maintainer of numerous modules, including Metatag, Twitter, and Panelizer. He’s also a provisional member of the Security Team, answers questions in IRC, is involved in writing documentation and mentoring others, reviews patches, and in the past year has taken a lead position with his employer’s (Mediacurrent) contrib efforts.
Damien is active in his local community. He helped organize code sprints in New Hampshire earlier this year, runs a monthly meetup in his adoptive hometown of Keene, NH, and has collaborated on several DrupalCamps. He has presented at 10 Drupal events: DrupalCamps Florida and Atlanta in 2009, DrupalCamps Florida and Wisconsin in 2010, DrupalCamp New Hampshire 2011, DrupalCamp Atlanta 2012, DrupalCamp New Hampshire 2013, NERDSummit 2014, DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015, and NERDSummit 2015.
Damien has been a member of the Drupal community since early 2007, when he was introduced to the project by Ryan Price (liberate). Damien subcontracted to work with Ryan on several sites, but didn’t get involved in the project and the community until 2008, when he began working on Drupal in a full-time capacity.
“The first time I used Drupal, I thought I was doing more work to make the system do what I wanted than it would take to build something custom,” Damien said. “But when I got to use Drupal 5 for migrating off of a proprietary platform, and when I began working with other people who knew how Drupal worked, I finally started to understand the benefits of using an existing system. I started to see the long term benefits, as well as the fact that you get so much more out of the box that you don’t have to build every time. So I came in from a place of appreciating Drupal’s technical capabilities, and then once I got involved in the local community in Florida, as well as on Twitter and in the issue queues, I never looked back."
Damien came into the community just after the launch of Drupal 6, when there was a lot of momentum behind the software. "There was a lot of really positive energy and openness and willingness to help. There was a huge amount of people coming into Drupal when D6 came out in '08. There was a large increase in the number of sites using it, and its popularity was really building. There was a lot of excitement and encouragement to use it and to get involved. It was a very open and welcoming space.
"I was lucky—I had Ryan as a mentor, and I got to know Mike Anello(ultimate) as well, and in my second week on the job I had training from Angie Byron(webchick) and Nate Haug(quicksketch). So I was immediately getting all this advice and support from amazing people. Getting to know Angie and Nate then helped break the ice, so to speak, when it came to chatting with people on IRC.
"Being part of our huge open source community gives you a chance to be a part of something larger than yourself, to make a difference in the lives of many people,” Damien said of his involvement with Drupal. This philosophy is reflected in Damien’s numerous noteworthy contributions; the one that he’s the most proud of is the Metatag module.
"Getting Metatag 1.0 out the door was a huge milestone,” he said. "We took so long to get it finished and part of it was that I didn’t feel we could release it until we had internationalization working properly. I also wanted to make sure we included revisions, so editorial teams could have teams for the meta tag changes they wanted to implement. In hindsight, it might have been better to release earlier and add those later, but at the time I felt that they were such core pieces to the editorial experience that it would be doing a disservice if we didn’t have them.
"There were hundreds of people who helped get Metatag out the door—from Dave Reid’s(Dave Reid) initial work in building the architecture, to hundreds of people who swooped in with a patch. For example, Jen Lampton(jenlampton) patched it so entities could work a bit better, and somebody else came in with a patch for the revisions. It was an amazing experience to be sitting there, almost like a parking attendant rather than a product owner. Instead of strictly actively developing—though I did a lot of development on it too—I was able to help supervise. There were just so many people helping out, it was an amazing experience to be a part of."
What’s his favorite Drupal memory? “I really enjoyed getting to present at DrupalCon Los Angeles earlier this year with many people I’ve looked up to for years, said Damien. “I presented with Tim Plunkett(tim.plunkett), Jakob Perry(japerry), David Snopek(dsnopek), Kris Vanderwater( eclipsegc), and Caroline Boyden(cboyden). We put together a group where we got to give a State of the Union address—kind of continuing the tradition that Earl Miles had set in place a few years previously when Drupal 7 had just come out. We got to say, 'This is where things are at the moment and this is where we’re going for Drupal 8.' It was great to be a part of that."
When not working with Drupal or participating in his local community, Damien spends time with his family and enjoys playing ukulele. “I’ve been trying to get our two oldest kids into learning the uke because it’s a fun instrument. The person that I learn from is someone who’s an incredibly gifted player and teacher, and we’re extremely glad he decided to move to our small little town of Keene, NH. It's great when you can learn from someone who is utterly passionate about what they’re doing, which is why I’ve so appreciated the people I’ve been able to learn from in Drupal, too."
Thank you for all your work on Drupal, Damien. We all appreciate you!
