DrupalCampWI and Beyond: Joining A Community

As Brian's previous post says, we've had this idea for Druplash (which means Drupal, Flash, Services/AMFPHP, and most importantly SWFAddress) since last spring. We've both been involved in Drupal in the last several years. Brian got an earlier start, and I was first exposed to Drupal through Kevin Reynen's vision for its use at Bradley University.

Brian and I get ready to deliver the first incarnation of our presentation on Druplash/Druplex.

My feelings about Drupal are probably best expressed through a comment that webchick made in IRC last weekend, which I will poorly paraphrase here, "Whenever I have a website project, I look at how I can fit Drupal to it."

Drupal's an amazing project, and you get so much with an install of Drupal - user and role management, a very secure login system, the flexibility of using theme functions to easily change output, using locale to translate parts of the user interface you want to change, and FormAPI, which I have just started working with over the past two weeks.

I bring this up because Brian and I had both been using Drupal for at least a year and a half, yet we hadn't really jumped into the community yet. Brian had gone to one Central Illinois Drupal meetup which I couldn't attend due to a musical engagement, and we'd each submitted a patch or two: I did an exceedingly simple patch to Services, and Brian submitted some new functionality back to WebFM.

Regardless, DrupalCampWI would really open my eyes to how vast the Drupal community is and how I could take part.

Yum Yum Takeout, a little show of what the MM Program at Bradley does.

I have to first thank Jim Ferolo, my boss and program director at Bradley University's Multimedia Program for sponsoring us to go to this conference. I'm thankful that I get to teach in an environment like the Multimedia Program that encourages innovation. We teach standards-based web design, PHP and MySQL, and I'll be showing students Drupal along with WordPress this semester for their advanced web design class, in which they'll produce a dynamic portfolio.

Brian and I in the middle of our presentation, as we talk about open source options for making SWF files.

As we made our way to MSOE to present on Flash and Flex integration with Drupal, I really didn't know what to expect. I knew that KarenS, the co-maintainer of CCK, one of the top two most important contrib modules, would be there, and that we'd also have some people driving up from Chicago. I did not realize that we'd also have Larry Garfield, aka Crell, there. He had been voted onto the Drupal Assocation Board of Directors merely a few days before DrupalCampWI, and he kicked off the event with a presentation on the Drupal community.

One of the very first things he stressed was the many, many ways that you can contribute. I'm lucky enough to be approaching ninja-in-training status with Drupal - I thoroughly understand the theme system now, I've got a module and several more patches under my belt, and so on, but there are plenty of other ways to contribute, especially in terms of documentation, design and marketing. Documentation is easier to do and is probably more effective when it's done by a fresh set of eyes. This fresh set of eyes can also suggest usability enhancements. We also need designers to create themes (which will be much easier in Drupal 6) and marketing materials to help spread the message of Drupal and its community to people who haven't yet used it.

Larry Garfield (aka Crell) giving a pep talk about the Drupal Assocation and how you can contribute.

There's several ways to help improve the functionality of Drupal and its contributed modules. Even if you're not tech savvy, you can submit bugs or issues to projects' issues queues - if your favorite module doesn't appear to work correctly, submit a well-written bug report with information on how to replicate the problem. If you're pretty knowledgeable with a given module, why not check the issue queue once or twice a week and see if there's an easy answer you can take care of for the maintainer? They'll love you for it, as any users you help. Since Crell's pep talk, I've submitted a patch for an issue in the Drupal 6 release candidate. These things aren't even necessarily that labor intensive - someone had already commented on what it would take to make it happen, and I just did the legwork of installing Drupal 6, editing the code, double-checking the fix, and posting the patch on the issue queue.

Finally, when you know PHP and understand a bit about how Drupal's internals work, submit a patch that fixes a bug, or even better, one that adds that feature you've always wanted. Finally, and the most difficult but potentially most rewarding, once the code gets unfrozen for Drupal 7, team up with others to make the changes you want to see happen for the next version of Drupal. I would personally love to see Services (or something like it) built into core for D7.

A room full of Drupalers from several states at DrupalCampWI.

There's some other great things that you can do to score Drupal karma. I have what may be a surprising confession to make: before DrupalCampWI, I had never used IRC. Halfway through the day, I installed Colloquy and started chatting, and I've been hooked since. We got some pretty big names in the #drupalcampwi channel - Boris Mann of Bryght / RainCity Studios dropped by and others popped in an out. I've been in #drupal and #drupal-support for several hours each week now, helping answer questions for newbies, and it's a good feeling to help point some people down the right path as they start to work with this great platform. And for you non-coders out there, #drupal-support questions tend to be higher level - what module would I use to a certain end, or why is my CSS layout not working?

As Brian's previous post alluded to, we'll be posting a lot in the weeks to come about our new module, but I felt a need to post this, both as a reminder of what you can do for this community, regardless of your technical skill set, and to thank everyone at DrupalCampWI for letting us present and opening my eyes to what's out there.