As with most other Drupal development studios, our May was dominated by DrupalCon. For the first week we were doing final preparations - making sure everything was ready for our booth, adding the final polish to our presentations, and packing for the trip. Needless to say, it was an excellent week from many perspectives, and we look forward to DrupalCon being in New Orleans next year.

DrupalCon Code Sprints

Part of the amazing week at DrupalCon, that many of us had a particularly good time with, were the code sprints. While I worked on plotting some SEO improvements for drupal.org and then on Panelizer a bit, Brad MacDonald helped fix a CSS issue in core, Mark Casias mentored some others and worked on a Views issue, and Matt Davis collaborated with some others to get the amazing display architecture from weather.com into a contributable state.

Sponsored work

This month saw our first Drupal 8 site launch - as it would happen, on the last day of DrupalCon. Along with the launch of the Manhattan Associates’ new site, much of our client-sponsored work see their first production usage. The initial site launch included the culmination of several months of work porting D7 modules and writing some new contributable modules, including:

All of our work on these are being made available through their respective drupal.org issue queues. We look forward to finishing off the ports and keeping them stable.

Along with this we also got time to work some other projects, including:

  • Advanced Forum was updated to allow the bundled Views and Panels integration to be disabled, making it easier to customize them.
  • A script for Metatag to import data from Nodewords. This was included in Metatag v7.x-1.5 that was just released.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

The fourth Global Accessibility Awareness Day took place on May 21st this year, and a few of us tried to do our bit. Having led her way this year with a string of excellent blog posts on the topic, Michelle Williamson hatched the idea of us all collaborating on a mini code sprint for part of the day. Having received buy-in from upper management, she and Matt Goodwin got us psyched up with an internal presentation earlier in the week. While our tangible progress was a little low, in part to some confusion over Drupal 8.0.x vs 8.1.x branches, some accessibility improvements made their way into CTools and Panelizer.

The highlight of the day for me was discovering just how easy it is to use web browser plugins, like HTML CodeSniffer, to critique a page's accessibility. Once the flaws are identified they can be fixed, and then the fix submitted as a patch on drupal.org for everyone to benefit from.

Even more events!

While DrupalCon is behind us, several people have been planning for other events over the coming months:

Miscellaneous Contributions

As mentioned earlier, half of the month was dominated by DrupalCon. Add a short week into the mix and there ended up being very little time for self-directed contributions. We did make some progress, though, clocking in just over sixty hours for the month doing our own thing:

  • Mark released Smart Trim v7.x-1.5 to resolve a small security issue, and also worked on several core issues.
  • Paul continued work on his Entity Reference View Formatter module for D8, focusing on tests.
  • Alex worked on a few core issues.
  • Derek Reese started a new module called Entity Reference Field Reference Range.
  • Michelle Cox continued work on the Advanced Forum module.
  • Metatag finally reached its v7.x-1.5 release; I wrote about this separately.
  • Both Paul and Michelle worked on the Webform module’s port to D8.
  • Fieldable Panels Panes finally saw its first full release since 2013. The new v7.x-1.6 includes a wealth of improvements and fixes by the community, and is a recommended update for all sites.
  • I finally resolved problems with the test suites for the Twitter module, clearing the way for further work, and hopefully a new release in June.

Summer beckons

While no doubt several of us will be taking some much needed time off this coming month, I'm hoping we'll continue getting back into progress contributing to our favorite open source software (OSS) project. Personally I intend catching up on the Twitter module's wealth of RTBC patches and carving out a new release, and possibly also a new release for Panelizer. Once those are out it'll be time to hide in a quiet basement for a while as I work through Panelizer's long-standing problems with content revisions.

We'll see you in the issue queues!

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