I have decades of experience in event organization starting from student summer camps in high school all the way to developer conferences for hundreds and then thousands of people. Especially with open source events, we found that these gatherings are especially good to get on the same page even on contentious questions and could be very effective to involve new contributors, if you provide the appropriate environment. Here is a model that worked in my experience if you plan to involve people in your projects.
This weekend (Friday to Sunday) is Drupal Global Contribution Weekend 2022! While there are some in person events such as in Ukraine, there are various online events that allow anyone to join. I'll highlight three opportunities to work on your Drupal 9 or Drupal 10 readiness.
I apparently released the Drupal configuration schema cheat sheet 7 years ago (wow!) to help people adopt the then new format to describe configuration structure. I keep getting questions and requests about it, so decided to make a major update to it now and bring it to the present day for Drupal 9.
As you may know, we are planning to release Drupal 10 in 2022 (as early as June), because Drupal 9's Symfony 4 and CKEditor 4 are both end of life the year after, around the end of 2023. So we plan go give enough time for people to update to Drupal 10 before Drupal 9 goes end of life. A similar situation happened with Drupal 8 to 9 driven by Symfony 3 to 4. However, moving Drupal 10 from Symfony 4 to 5 would again only give us a couple years of time to move on to Symfony 6 next, so the current plan is to move to Symfony 6 straight.
It is hard to believe that almost 6 years passed since Drupal 8.0.0's release on November 19th 2015. What feels like it was just yesterday, Drupal 8 brought lots of amazing new things to the platform. Near and dear to my heart was full multilingual support that I worked on with over 1600 people for several years. Also stars of the Drupal 8 show were content authoring with the bundled CKEditor, the vastly improved configuration management system, Views in core, built-in web service support, more semantic markup, in-place editing, PHPUnit integration, better caching, improved accessibility, even aural announcements for page changes, and so on and on. Drupal 8 embraced collaboration within the PHP ecosystem and beyond with our use of Symfony, Twig, Guzzle and gradually embraced application of Composer.
With one day to go until Drupal 8's end of life (on November 2, 2021), now is a good time to take stock of your Drupal 8 sites' modules. Use Upgrade Status to check for environment and module compatibility with Drupal 9. Given that there is only one day left, you will highly likely not be on Drupal 9 tomorrow.
Drupal 8 was released on November 19th, 2015. The end of life comes on November 2, 2021, after almost 6 years of support. Is this too soon? I think the answer will be different from situation to situation. But why do we need to end of life Drupal 8 in the first place?
Unless you are on Drupal 8.8.x or Drupal 8.9.x, Upgrade Status will tell you to move to that version first, before you can upgrade to Drupal 9. (At this point it should really tell you that 8.9.x is the only acceptable version to upgrade to). Why is that?
