Community Spotlight

Drupal users around the world know Aaron Winborn (aaron), a long-time community member who made countless contributions to the project and to the people who use it. From building the Media module to helping organize NYC Camp, Aaron had a massive impact on our community and our project.

It’s time for another community spotlight, and this month, we’re highlighting a community member who has made huge contributions to the success of the Drupal project and of DrupalCon — and not only through code.

Paul Johnson (pdjohnson) of Manchester is currently the Drupal Director of CTI Digital, and is the social media lead for most DrupalCons. He also maintains the @Drupal Twitter account. Paul has grown the DrupalCon social media program from a small following on twitter to a set of huge, engaged channels.

The Drupal Association sat down with Paul in late January to talk about some of his accomplishments and passions.

For this month’s community spotlight, we wanted to showcase three stellar Drupalistas who went above and beyond at the Dev Days Szeged sprints. Emanuel Greucean (gremy), Maurits Dekkers (Mauzeh), and Ernő Zsemlye (zserno) all made big contributions to the project at Dev Days Szeged. Here’s a little bit about each.

Since joining Drupal.org in 2007, Lee Rowlands (larowlan) has been an important contributor to the Drupal project. A major core contributor and Drupal 8 advocate, Rowlands has become a well-recognized and celebrated member of the Drupal community.

Rowlands is an important Drupal figure in Australia, and has spoken at DrupalCamp Brisbane 2010, Drupal Downunder Melbourne 2012, DrupalCon Sydney 2013 and Drupal South Wellington 2014. An occasional mentor during Drupal Office Hours in the Australian timezone (GMT+10), Rowlands is also a well-recognized figure in the international Drupal community for his involvement with core and his contributions to a huge variety of projects on Drupal.org.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

Jim Morrison and a naked native american came to me in a dream and told me it was my destiny. Just kidding. I started up my own IT consulting business and I'd built a couple of Drupal 5 sites.

Scott Reynen has done some fun things in the Drupal community. Some notable examples:

• Coordinated many meetups in Denver ensuring they happen, with interesting topics, and tasty pizza options
• Helped to organize several Drupalcamps in Colorado (which will be June 29th/30 in 2013)
• Presents on various topics at Drupalcamps
• Helps as one of the 3 site maintainers for groups.drupal.org
• Is an active Project Application queue reviewer heavily interested in new-contributor-onboarding and project quality
• Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue
• And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?