DrupalCamp Twin Cities & Views in Drupal Core

Two weeks ago, I headed up to Minneapolis for the 2012 DrupalCamp Twin Cities (tcdrupal), courtesy the camp's sponsors. I was invited to the camp to facilitate a Get Involved with Core sprint along the same lines as what we did at Denver. I also had another, "secret" purpose in attending the camp...

Views in Drupal Core

...And the big secret is out. During tcdrupal, Tim Plunkett and I started helping Earl Miles with some very early work on the Views in Drupal Core (VDC) initiative.

Messages just keep getting clearer

People have been asking for years for Views to be in core, especially since the core Field API was developed to replace CCK during the Drupal 7 release cycle. You can read merlinofchaos' blog post for what some of the obstacles to this were in the past and how they've mostly been overcome, but for me, the clearest reason that Views should be in core is in the Denver Driesnote and Dries' core convo. Dries makes a strong case that including more site building tools in core is the next step to make Drupal more awesome, and Views is pretty much the ultimate site building tool. Plus:

• Views in Drupal 8 makes D8 relevant to, well, pretty much everyone.
• Core is frankly not usable until Views is stable, and porting Views for a major version is an enormous task.
• Views in core means that Views will become part of the core development and QA process, which means a better Drupal experience for everyone.

This gun's for hire

Serendipitously, right around the time I was reconsidering my full-time employment, merlinofchaos mentioned VDC to me. I'm already enjoying contributing to the initiative, and (given funding) I can devote a significant amount of time to it.

My role in VDC is rooted in my involvement with the core contribution process. I anticipate that a lot of my work will be in patch review, test writing, QA (applying the core gates to Views), and facilitating others' contributions. Additionally, unlike the other members of the VDC team, I have not been involved in Views' development previously, and so can provide an "outside" perspective.

I could use just a little help

So I glossed over this above, but there is one remaining obstacle to getting Views into core: it's a heck of a lot of work. I can devote a couple hours a week to the initiative as a part of my normal community contribution, but it could be a significant part of my workweek. (This is true of others on the current VDC team as well.) Given funding, I'm confident that we could make fantastic progress on this project as a D8 initiative. We have the right people at the right time; all we need is to ensure that the right people have enough time.

Core Contribution Tour 2012: Stop 2

VDC (and an inconvenient cold) occupied me for the first two days of tcdrupal, but the Sunday code sprint was the primary reason I was at the camp. Joe Shindelar, Tim Plunkett, and I helped twenty-three sprint participants configure local development environments with git and Drupal 8, and then got them started working on core issues.

We ran things a bit differently than we did at Denver on account of the smaller group. We sort of forgot to have people pair up to work on issues, but it worked out alright because our participants still took the initiative to help each other. (In retrospect I do think the pair contributing works best.)

We also did not pre-populate a list of issues for the sprint (partly on account of my cold). We were just barely able to keep up with finding issues for people between three mentors by using issues from the weekly core mentoring hitlist that I maintain and the core mentoring task queues. It mostly worked out alright, with two exceptions: a couple participants discovered that it took a lot of effort to find relevant issues for triage and in the novice queue. Based on their feedback, I'm definitely going to make sure we have a curated list of at least those types of issues for the next sprint, and I'd also like to make some improvements to how we manage the novice queue. (More on that in a future post.)

Hugs and thanks to everyone who participated in the sprint, especially to those who took the time to give me feedback on the process.

Something happening somewhere

If you missed TCDrupal but are interested in hands-on training and mentoring for contributing to core (all experience levels welcome!), I'm leading contribution sprints at the following summer events:

• Drupaldelphia, June 22-23
• NYC Camp, July 20-22
• Midwest Developer Summit, July 26-27
• DrupalCon Munich, August 20-24

I'm also looking for co-mentors for these sprints, so if you are familiar with the core contribution process and can attend one or more of these events, let me know! I'd love your help. (I'd be especially grateful for more folks who can help others set up their development environments, particularly for Windows users...)

I'll also be at Drupal Developer Days Barcelona for June 13-18, thanks to a generous contribution from chx. I'll be there primarily to work on the D8 Entity API and on VDC, but I'd also love to chat about core mentoring and the core contribution process, so feel free to ping me or track me down if interested.

Finally, even if you can't make one of these events, you can also give or get help every week during core contribution mentoring hours in #drupal on IRC, 02:00 UTC Tuesdays (that's Monday night in the US) and 16:00 UTC Wednesdays.

Overall it was a pretty awesome camp.