webchick.net

very helpful lioness

acquia

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes... (and a brief history of Drupal)

Mon, 08/02/2021 - 01:57 -- webchick

What the what?!


A crying Druplicon
Sad Drupal is Sad. :'(

Well, might as well get right down to it... I've made the incredibly difficult decision to leave Acquia, and my employment there officially ended last week. :'(

Some important notes about this:

  • This is in no way a negative reflection on Acquia. I have worked with SO many amazing people there in the past 10 years(!), and have endless gratitude for all of the challenges, opportunities, learning, and laughs. The leadership team has a solid strategy, and the effort everyone there puts into achieving it every day is inspiring.
  • This is in no way a negative reflection on Drupal. In my time here, I've seen Drupal through its youthful toddler years, to its surly teenage years, and now Drupal's all grown up, with a nice, stable apartment downtown. :) Drupal is and remains an amazingly powerful, flexible solution for building every single type of application one can dream of, with an incredibly strong and vibrant community behind it.
  • What this is about is about an opportunity that came up to take lessons learned from Drupal and apply them more broadly to (hopefully) make an even bigger impact (more on that below).
  • Also, I'm not leaving the Drupal community (more on that below too), and will stay on as Core Committer/Product Manager, albeit with less time than I used to have to dedicate to it, for rather obvious reasons. (This is ultimately a good thing, as it'll direct that time towards more strategic/impactful endeavours.)

An analysis of Drupal major version adoption

Fri, 06/05/2015 - 13:44 -- webchick

TL;DR We need to ship D8. ;)

I was sent this question today from a co-worker:

"We always talk anecdotally about how Drupal adoption slows before a new release and then picks back up. Do we have any data to support that for Drupal 7 or Drupal 6? I’d love to know the impact of Drupal 8 as well – but not sure that’s possible. Any thoughts?"

This is a great question, but since email is where information goes to die ;), I figured I would copy my response into a blog post as well.

Drupal core committer takes Acquia Certification exam. You won't believe what happens next!

Mon, 03/24/2014 - 13:43 -- webchick

TL;DR I passed. :P Here's a run-down of what the experience was like.

Up-front disclaimer: I work for Acquia. However, I was not involved in the creation of Acquia Certification and had no insight to the test beforehand apart from a single sample question. I'm also writing this on my personal blog, rather than Acquia.com, because these are *my* thoughts/impressions, and haven't been vetted by anyone else. :) Carry on!

Hit-list for top Drupal 7 module stabilization

Fri, 11/11/2011 - 00:27 -- webchick

Back in September, http://drupalcontribstatus.com/ was launched to track the porting status of the top 60 contributed projects to Drupal 7. Since then, we've whittled the list down to just 20 projects remaining, as well as tons of progress on the rest! YEAH!

I contacted each of the maintainer(s) of those remaining projects and have come up with a list of next steps for each. Your help is needed if we want to get that graph up to 100% by year's end. (Just in time for Drupal 7's first birthday! :))

As a general rule, help is needed in the following areas:

  • Issue queue triage (Difficulty: Novice): Going through the issue queues of these modules and doing things like closing duplicate reports, verifying that bug reports are valid, and so on. None of this is particularly difficult work, but time that maintainers have to spend doing it is time they can NOT spend porting their modules to Drupal 7.
  • Reviewing patches (Difficulty: Intermediate): Going through the issues in the queue marked "needs review" and making sure patches still apply, then testing to make sure that they still work, then reporting on the results of your testing are all critical things that really help save maintainers time, and ensure that any actionable issues are escalated to their attention.
  • Experience in various core sub-systems (Difficulty: Intermediate to Advanced): If you know how to write automated tests, are familiar with how the render API works, can answer questions about the new Field API or File API, there are several issues identified that could use YOUR help! Note that you don't necessarily need to be in MAINTAINERS.txt to provide this help, either; if you've already started building Drupal 7 sites and modules, you likely know enough to be helpful!
  • Co-maintainership (Difficulty: Intermediate) Many of these projects are seeking co-maintainers. If you or your business/customers depend on any of these modules, investing solid time in the issue queue to help review and roll patches for issues in need would be of tremendous benefit, and would help position yourself to ask for commit rights so that you can ensure these modules stay solid going forward.
  • JavaScript knowledge! (Difficulty: Intermediate to Advanced) Seriously. We are, generally speaking, a bunch of PHP nerds. If you know JavaScript, you can be helpful on a number of different (and important) fronts.

So, without further ado, here are some specifics on how you can help Drupal 7, and the maintainers whose code you rely on!

Notes from Drupal 8 status update talk

Fri, 10/28/2011 - 13:36 -- webchick

Here are some notes from the Drupal 8 status update talk that Dries and I gave today to the Acquia team, since this seemed like useful info for the community to know as well. :) It covers both process changes for addressing previous issues that arose in Drupal 7, as well as a status update on Drupal 8 progress to-date. This could be useful to folks who have been wondering where all of the various Drupal 8 status updates fit into the "bigger" picture.

Please comment here if I left anything out, or messed up anything.

What has webchick been up to lately?

Tue, 10/04/2011 - 22:00 -- webchick

At the end of June I wrote up a list of things I'd been working on as part of Acquia's Office of the CTO. Here's another update for this quarter!

Drupal 7

Last quarter was focused primarily on stabilization of Drupal core and incorporation of various processes to help ensure it stays stable. With that in hand, this quarter my focus shifted more towards accelerating Drupal 7 adoption.

Tracking the porting status of Drupal 7 modules

Mon, 09/12/2011 - 13:26 -- root

The number of sites running Drupal 7 has been steadily climbing over the past few months, and is now north of 140K sites. At the same time, the number of Drupal 6 sites has started to flat-line.

Graph shows Drupal 7 adoption sky-rocketing, Drupal 6 adoption flattening out.

So if you haven't started yet, now's a great time to begin thinking about and planning your site's upgrade path to Drupal 7.

To assist with this task, there's an amazing, little-known module out there by sun called Upgrade Status, which is an essential tool in the site upgrade planning process. It will inspect the modules installed on your site give you a custom-tailored report about each of their porting status to the next version of Drupal. It also provides other upgrade helpers, such as a block with links that walk you step-by-step through the process of a major upgrade.

Obviously, though, the biggest barrier to doing D6 -> D7 site upgrades (apart from time, of course :)) is the porting status of contrib. So using the magic of Upgrade Status module's data I've set up a site at http://drupalcontribstatus.com/ to track the status of the top 60 contributed projects (the top 50 + 10 that were moved into core):

DrupalContribStatus.com

The intent of this site is to act as a dashboard for folks who want to help the module porting process happen faster. There are helpful links track the issues that block a D7 release (a convention established in a previous post), issues that need review, instructions for how to take over abandoned projects, and so on.

We're currently at 32 of 60 projects ported (though obviously, most of the betas/alphas of these modules are pretty solid or we wouldn't have 100K+ D7 sites...). Can we hit all 60 by the end of the year? :) Let's try! If every DrupalCamp between now and then focused on a few of these remaining modules, I bet we could do it!

PS: Feel free to use the Contrib Status module to set up your own site to publicly track and create momentum around specific modules you care about. But WARNING: The code was largely written between the hours of Stupid O'Clock and Why Are You Still Up Dummy, so I take no responsibility for it whatsoever. :P~ If you have ideas on how to make it better, please leave feedback in the issue queue!

Speaking at WordCamp SF 2011: Suggestions?

Wed, 08/03/2011 - 18:16 -- webchick

On Saturday, August 13, I'm going to be speaking at WordCamp San Francisco, after being graciously invited by Jane Wells, WordPress's UI Goddess. :)

For Drupal community folks, are there questions you have about WordPress and/or its community that I could try and find answers to? Are there things you think I should particularly highlight about Drupal and its community before an audience of several hundred WordPress fanatics?

The impact of the #D7CX movement and next steps

Mon, 07/18/2011 - 10:06 -- webchick

Back around the time of the Drupal 7 code freeze, Moshe Weitzman proposed the #D7CX (Drupal 7 Contrib Experience) movement. Developers were encouraged to add a #D7CX pledge to their project pages, indicating that they would port their contributed modules and themes to Drupal 7 by the time Drupal 7 was released.

Here is some data to measure the impact that this movement had, relative to Drupal 6, as well as some recommended next steps to help us complete the work that #D7CX started.

A month (and a bit) in the Office of the CTO

Wed, 06/29/2011 - 00:05 -- webchick

Last month, I started my new job in Acquia's Office of the CTO. I posted my to-do list last month of a given week's worth of work, to try and provide some insight as to what I'm working on. Since that probably reads as chicken-scratch to you (my handwriting tends to be one-way encryption ;)), here are some of the highlights:

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