When we started on our plan to organize Mediacurrent's contributions at the start of the month we had certain goals in mind. The first was to improve collaboration amongst our staff, to help and learn from each other, and a secondary goal was to get some module releases out the door. How did we do?
Collaborate!
First off, excluding contributed work that was done for specific clients, the team totalled more than 180 hours of contrib time this past month!
As I hinted at in my report on Mediacurrent's SprintWeekend2015 participation, the collaboration has started working rather nicely. For much of the month both Matt and Michelle worked through items in the CTools and Panels issue queues, even tag-teaming on several, with myself joining in on a few.
Some of the team's favorite patches from the month include:
- #813754 (CTools), #2410293 (Panels) and #2410363 (Panelizer) - allow the machine name of Panels variants to be edited from the admin UI.
- #2288741 (CTools) and #2288747 (Panels) - allow the HTML tag used for pane titles to be changed.
Speaking of which, the current maintainer of both, Jacob "japerry" Perry, released the newest versions of both CTools (v7.x-1.6) and Panels (v7.x-3.5) at the end of the month, which included many fixes and improvements worked on by the Mediacurrent team. I'm personally very proud of how many issues we were able to contribute on - our team were mentioned on 18 of the 59 issues for CTools and 8 of the 32 issues for Panels, never mind the many others that we reviewed & pushed through to RTBC.
Along with those two modules, work was put into a number of others. David Younker put time into fixing some bugs in the Twitter and GoogleNews modules, while Bob Kepford continued work on his WysiKit module and some bugs on Fieldable Panels Panes. This month Andrew Riley dove head first into a problem between IPE (part of Panels), Panelizer and Workbench Moderation, and if he's not heard from within the next week we're sending a rescue team! Chris Hill and James Rutherford got involved in the D8 migration path, with Chris focusing on a bug he found in the comment system migration. Lastly, I worked on a trifecta of social network integration modules - Twitter, Drupagram and Tumblr.
Releases
With our goal of "release early, release often,” we had a few module releases of our own this past month:
- Panels Everywhere v7.x-1.0-rc2 includes a good many fixes since the previous release and is much more solid than before. There are just a few more items remaining before it's ready for a 1.0 release.
- Panels Everywhere v6.x-1.2-rc1 matches its D7's sibling for fixes and improvements, once the D7 release hits gold this one will be ready too.
- Metatag v7.x-1.5-beta1 - includes a several fixes since the previous release.
- Panelizer v7.x-3.2-beta1 has a huge number of improvements and fixes since the previous v3.1. This will be the subject of a forthcoming blog post. I had hoped to release the final v3.2 but it here's just too much still left to do.
- Fieldable Panels Panes v7.x-1.6beta1 has many improvements and fixes from v1.5, and again needs a little fine tuning before it's ready for the big v1.6 sticker.
While all of our / my lofty goals were not quite reached, I'm very pleased with the progress.
New modules
During the month we created several new modules and adopted some others:
- Webform Views Select - Matt Davis adopted this sandbox module and is working to get a stable release out soon.
- Instagram Social Feed - David Younker and Mark Casias continue to make progress on David's flexible Instagram sandbox module, expect it to be a full project soon.
- Twitter - I was given co-maintainer access to this, expect a minor bug fix release out soon.
- Drupagram - I was also given co-maintainer access to this, after offering to help with it after doing some heavy patch triage; expect a major bug fix release soon.
Client contributions
It should be noted that some of the contributions were part of client projects, so thanks are definitely due to them:
- David and Mark's work on social media modules,
- My work on other social media modules,
- Andrew's work on Panelizer,
- Bob's work on the WysiKit module.
This continues our "contrib first" mantra and I'm so glad that many of our clients understand the value of giving back to the community so that all can benefit.
Plans for February
The second month of our committee will be split in three. The first part will focus on pushing the beta and release-candidate module releases from January that extra step towards a hopeful a final release; additionally there are a few more modules that didn't quite get the attention they needed, so I'm hoping to add in a few more along the way.
A new part of our group's duties will be to begin porting some of our modules to Drupal 8. We now have clients looking to start new Drupal 8 sites and we will need some of our contrib modules ported in order to launch them. As always, we'll be working with other members of the community to make the most of our time and try to get them ported more quickly than working alone, so we look forward to your help in this task :-)
Lastly, we're going to be slightly expanding our Issue Hit Squad efforts and coming up with a plan to track issues that other team members and clients ask us to follow up on. This will involve an ever-expanding hodgepodge of modules from around the Drupalsphere, but hopefully taking them one at a time we'll be able to have a lot of impact.
Parting words
As always, I'm grateful to Mediacurrent for their continued investment in Drupal, our staff for their interest and time, and the Drupal community for collaborating with us to continue pushing our favorite tools forward.
We'll see you in the issue queues!
Additional Resources
Introducing the Mediacurrent Contrib Committee | Mediacurrent Blog Post
Contrib First | Mediacurernt Video
The Power of Giving | Mediacurrent Blog Post
