July was a rather busy month, with our gang pretty involved in two East coast conferences, between helping to run one and attending & presenting at another.
Client sponsored
We had some rather good client sponsored work this past month:
- Michelle Cox's work on fixing sites to be compatible with PHP 5.6 continued, as did her work to improve & review existing patches.
- Mark Casias continued to contribute to the Rules port to D8. While moving slowly, the project is making definite progress.
- One client migrating from D6 to D7 needed to convert from Page Title to Metatag, so I spruced up an existing patch by turning it into a Drush script.
- While doing performance tuning on a rather large site, a client uncovered some problems with the Memcache module, which led to me putting together a patch to resolve some timing problems in it. The patch needs some a bit more work to be committable, hopefully we’ll get to finish it off soon.
Self-directed contributions
We had a slightly quiet month on the contributions side, with a total of just over seventy hours of self-directed contributions, including a new weekly standup-style meeting that we’re doing.
- Dan Polant worked on his new Setster module, and issue queue triage for the Taxonomy Field Formatter module and the Commerce Coupon module.
- David Younker continued work on his port of the Require Login module to D8.
- Derek Reese continued his D8 port of the Range module.
- Derek DeRaps released v7.x-1.0-alpha2 of the Classy Panels Style module he maintains.
- Jason Want researched some options and started working on the Critical CSS module.
- Mark continued his efforts on the jPlayer issue queue and its port to D8.
- Matt Goodwin started contributing to the Panopoly project, starting with some issue queue work.
- Michelle continued working on many PHP 5.5/5.6 issues for Drupal 6 contrib modules.
- I released Metatag 1.7, including the aforementioned Page Title conversion script, worked on the Imagecache Token module in preparation for its first release, and continued to slog my way through the huge issue queue for the Twitter module.
Events
As mentioned, we put a good amount of time during July preparing for some events:
- For NYC Camp: we had ten members of staff attending, many of whom joined in for the code sprints and presented sessions on some of their favorite topics; we wrote about our anticipation of this event recently.
- GovCon: One of our PMs, Brad MacDonald, was one of the organizers for this very successful DrupalCamp in Washington, D.C.
Blog posts
During the month we published a few blog posts and webinars related to contrib modules:
- Chris Doherty wrote about theming in Drupal 8 without Panels.
- Dan wrote an interesting article about connecting directly to Apache Solr using the Sarnia module.
- Dawn Aly gave a presentation on best practices for improving SEO, featuring a few Drupal modules
- Michelle wrote about getting a Drupal 6 site ready to run on PHP 5.5 or 5.6, which references many of the patches she worked on over the past two months.
Other
As mentioned earlier, this week we started doing a weekly scrum-style stand-up meeting where we discuss what work we’ve done over the past week and what we hope to work on for the coming week. It has helped us keep each other up-to-date with what we’re working on, and has occasionally helped find others who know about a certain topic to further collaboration amongst the team.
Plans for August
This month we're going to keep our goals light, but we are hoping for some more module releases and another event or two. Stay tuned!