With the hijinx of DrupalCon behind us, June saw a return to form for our contribution efforts.

Client sponsored work

While not quite as exciting as porting several modules to Drupal 8, a key aspect of our client-sponsored work in June was testing some Drupal 6 and 7 sites against PHP 5.6, which led to several new patches.

For anyone who's still running a Drupal 6 site with an older version of PHP, there are a number of bugs in contributed modules because of occasionally sloppy or inconsistent code. Thankfully there are a great many patches already available to help fix the problems. While the Drupal 6 ecosystem is a bit behind on fixes, Drupal 7 and its contrib world are mostly a-okay without needing patches, though in some cases a -dev release may be needed.

During the month the new "Plan" issue category was added, so we took advantage of this and helped to start organizing some new module releases:

.. along with working on patches for several other modules.

For the D6 releases we focused around digging up PHP compatibility patches, improving them when needed, and we linked some other RTBC issues that appeared reasonable. Issue queue triage is a very important duty, especially for some modules that have hundreds of issues, so helping with release planning can help maintainers and other contributes identify what should be worked on.

I’d like to make it clear that we’re not claiming ownership of the above, nor are we telling maintainers what should be done with their modules. Our intention is to help coordinate items that would be worthwhile to be included in what could probably be the final releases for those modules. While we strongly encourage Drupal 6 module maintainers to take a little effort to do a final PHP 5.4+ -compatible release, it’s obviously not within our power to dictate what they should do and we’ll gladly accept whatever they can do.

By the way, any sites that are still running on older versions of PHP really should take a look at 5.6 for its speed improvements, and try out patches from these issues to help fix the problems:

Likewise, if any other issues show up on other modules, please remember to tag the them with "PHP 5.4" to make them easier to find.

Other contributions

During the month we put in just over 90 hours of self-directed contributions, which included some good achievements:

Upcoming events

As mentioned last month, there are a few events taking place this coming month that many of us will be attending or are helping to organize:

We do hope you’ll join us!

Goals for July

While I don't want to hold anyone's feet to the fire, we are hoping to reach a few milestones this coming month:

  • Alex McCabe is also going to work on the D8 port of Pathauto.
  • Dan is intending to do new releases for Commerce Coupon, Commerce Giftcard and Commerce Discount Extra.
  • David is intending to continue working on the D8 ports of Require Login and Pathauto.
  • Derek Reese is hoping to finish porting the Range module to D8.
  • Jason Want is cooking up an idea for a D7 contrib module for improving frontend performance.
  • Mark is intending to update his module ports to be compatible with the latest D8 release.
  • My personal goals are to do a release for ImageCache Token (probably 7.x-1.0-beta1), Panelizer (3.2-beta2 or rc1), Fieldable Panels Panes 7.x-1.7 and Twitter 7.x-5.9.

Have a great month!

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Contrib Committee