Come sprint with us on Drupal 8 Contrib at Drupal South

Friday February 14th is the DrupalSouth Code Sprint, and PreviousNext are descending en masse to Wellington, New Zealand, to participate.

As a team we've been discussing what we'd like to sprint on. We've collectively agreed that the sprint would be an opportune time to work on porting some of our favourite contrib modules to Drupal 8.

Read on to find out our plans and how you can get involved.

by lee.rowlands /

The Drupal South code sprint

Are you coming to the Drupal South code sprint? If you are, the signup form is now open.

Here's your chance to meet some awesome Drupal contributors from Australia and the world.

What we're working on

aGov is our flagship Drupal distribution, tailored for Australian Government it has been a runaway success. The strength of the profile relies on the contributed modules that make up its foundation. 

We're keen to see aGov running on Drupal 8 as soon as possible so realise that this depends on porting these modules to Drupal 8.

The modules that make up aGov read like a who's who of the most popular contributed modules.

So in order to get the ball rolling and hopefully identify any issues in core, we're planning on working on porting some of the core contributed modules in aGov to Drupal 8 as part of the Drupal South code sprint.

Our plans

We plan to do this in a community friendly way using sandbox projects. Our process will look like so:

  1. Search the module's issue queue for a Meta about porting to Drupal 8. If one doesn't exist - create it.
  2. Clone the module into a sandbox and grant commit access to anyone at the sprint working on that module.
  3. Update the original module's meta with a link to the sandbox project where work is taking place.
  4. Work on the port, using the sandbox projects issue queue if required but commiting using the issue number from the original meta - ie maintaining commit messages.
  5. (Hopefully) Getting the module in a working form in Drupal 8.
  6. Updating the meta issue in the original queue with the git commands required to merge the changes/include the branch in the original repository

We think this gives sprinters maximum velocity but also does it in a manner that is consultive to the original module author.

As an example, I started this process for the Menu Block module, creating the sandbox here: https://drupal.org/sandbox/larowlan/2169967.

As you can see the commits all reference the main modules meta issue

What modules are we planning to work on

Some of the modules on the list include

  • Menu block 
  • Metatag
  • Pathauto
  • Redirect 403 to login
  • Search 404
  • Token
  • Twitter block
  • Workbench/Workbench moderation
  • Chosen
  • Custom Contextual Links

If you're in Wellington on February 14th, why not drop in and give us a hand! And if you're not - join us remotely via irc on #drupal-contribute!

Tagged

Drupal Development