sprint

Drupalaton 2014 was amazing. I got involved pretty late in the organization when we added sprinting capacity on all four days, but I must say doing that was well worth it. While the pre-planned schedule of the event focused on longer full day and half day workshops on business English, automation, rules, commerce, multilingual, etc. the sprint was thriving with backend developer luminaries such as Wim Leers, dawehner, fago, swentel, pfrennsen, dasjo as well as sizable frontend crew such as mortendk, lewisnyman, rteijeiro, emmamaria, etc. This setup allowed us to work on a very wide range of issues.

The list of 70+ issues we worked on shows our work on the drupal.org infrastructure, numerous frontend issues to clean up Drupal's markup, important performance problems, several release critical issues and significant work on all three non-postponed beta blockers at the time.

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Drupalers "shipped" from port to port; Photo by TCPhoto

Our coordinated timing with the TCDrupal sprints really helped in working on some of the same issues together. We successfully closed one of the beta blockers shortly after the sprint thanks to coordinated efforts between the two events.

Our list of issues also shows the success of the Rules training on the first day in bringing new people in to porting Rules components, as well as work on other important contributed modules: fixing issues with the Git deploy module's Drupal 8 port and work on the Drupal 8 version of CAPTCHA.

Thanks to the organizers, the sponsors of the event including the Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grants program for enabling us to have some of the most important Drupal developers work together on pressing issues, eat healthy and have fun on the way.

Ps. There is never a lack of opportunity to work with these amazing people. Several days of sprints are coming up around DrupalCon Amsterdam in a little over a month! The weekend sprint locations before/after the DrupalCon days are also really cool! See you there!

DrupalCon Amsterdam is coming up in just a few weeks and it is full of opportunities to learn about and get all your questions answered when it comes to multilingual Drupal. What's better, you can get involved making things happen and learn from those implementing the features firsthand. Here are my picks:

Multilingual Drupal 8 site building and programming

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• There is no excuse to not attend some of the sprints at and around DrupalCon. Sprints start two days ahead of the start of the conference on Saturday the week before. And there are still sprints going on the Sunday after the conference. It is not just the last day of DrupalCon itself where you can get involved and make a difference. In fact the leads are actually focusing more on the sprint on the weekend days. Also the weekend sprints are in a really cool venue. The best way to learn is to do!
• You are looking for more of a directed guide of Drupal 8 still with the possibility to do it all hands-on? Look no further than the Drupal 8 multilingual hands-on lab presented by Aimee Degnan of Hook42 and myself from Acquia. The schedule info is a bit misleading, this session spans two timeslots and lasts two hours. Bring your laptop with Drupal 8 freshly installed!
• Dive deeper into the APIs of Drupal 8! Francesco Placella from Tag1 presents Multilingual Content in D8: a Highly Evolved Permutated API showing how to code with the new system. While not strictly multilingual, in Field API is dead. Long live Entity Field API! swentel, yched and amateescu show how the most essential content element storage system changed and this is full of multilingual support of course.

Multilingual Drupal 7 site building and programming

• Multilingual Site Setup and Management is a half hour session from Robert Vandenberg and Rob Bailey of Lingotek back to back with Building a multilingual & multi-country e-commerce site for luxury brands another half hour talk from Arthur Murauskas of Adyax with real life examples.
• Dagmar Muth and Urs Bucher from Amazee Labs are presenting Building a Multilingual, Multidomain Drupal Site synthesizing their experience from multiple customers.
• I proposed the Multilingual therapy (questions and answers) BoF again! Waiting experienced folks as well as everyone with questions. You'll see even if you arrive with several questions, you can answer others! There is no set agenda, just to answer all the questions!

Moving localize.drupal.org forward

The localize.drupal.org site seriously needs people who care about it enough to devote time to maintaining and fixing bugs. I set up one more BoF to gather people interesting in the well-being of this site titled We love localize.drupal.org. We need to upgrade to Drupal 7, support the whole range of new Drupal 8 APIs, drastically improve performance and then get new features going.

These are all the multilingual pieces that I collected. There may still be more, BoF scheduling just started and I may have missed a session or two. Let us know in the comments what other great events happen around multilingual Drupal. See you in Amsterdam!

Drupal is right in the middle of web technology, an ideal integrator of all kinds of things. Just like PHP itself it may be clunky here and there but it is a very efficient tool to build great experiences. And even if you are a great JS developer or a pro PHP person, maybe you have mad debugging skills, you always have something to learn. Now there are great books, sometimes even better videos, but nothing beats hands-on learning. When you get together with other people working on the same thing you learn so much about how they work and even if you gain no new knowledge about programming per say, you learn new tricks and ways to achieve things:

Two days working with the Drupal Community in #DrupalDevDays help you to learn more than one week working alone at home :)

— Javi Santos (@javisr) March 27, 2014

Not only that but you can also look into how the tools you work with are made and that all of us are human:

Greatest thing about code sprints: Hearing respected core devs say "I don't understand that." "Me neither." We all learn. #drupaldevdays

— Marc van Gend (@marcvangend) March 28, 2014

Finally, by helping to improve the tools you use, you gain much better knowledge about them. Close to the start of my web involvement I worked a lot on translating the PHP documentation to Hungarian and I got into Drupal fixing core issues for translations. By becoming one of the thousands building the system you use you also gain more credibility when you are looking for help in your weak areas as well:

after almost a decade of #drupal love i just became a real drupalist at #drupaldevdays - i am now a core contributor! http://t.co/VziKa9y7h9

— aboros (@hunaboros) March 27, 2014

But not everyone can do this right? You need to be a professional programmer and pay expensive fees to get into events? Wrong! So wrong! There are always sprints around the globe and more and more local Drupal events are announced every day. Starting out with a simple issue on a one day sprint is a great start. Drupal can always be improved in all kinds of ways whether that is accessibility testing, documentation, perfecting button colors and radiuses or finding and documenting bugs. All of those are great contributions.

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Drupal Dev Days sprint photo by Amazee Labs

The best places to immerse yourself in contribution are multi-day sprints though. If you have any opportunity to go to those, I would definitely suggest you join one. Why? It takes a fair bit of time to get set up, understand the issue, start providing a solution and even though at the end of the one day sprint, you will promise to get back to it a week later from home, it is almost certainly not going to happen. There is nothing wrong with you, you just have other priorities when you get out of sprint-mode. So for ideal involvement pick a multi-day sprint. It is not only that you have more time to work on things, you can get to know the people better as well on the social events. Some conferences, especially DrupalCons include extended sprints before/after the event. If you just go to the main conference days, you have much less chance to interact with people who shape the future of Drupal, while at the extended sprints, you can get involved and work with them real time. How is that for growing your potential?

Here are some examples of events with multi-day sprints where my friends from the multilingual initiative will be sprinting, feel free to add more in the comments:

DrupalCamp Spain in Valencia is coming up in a little over a week on May 16-18th. All three days have sprinting opportunities and some of the leaders from multilingual, frontend and migrations will be there!

Some people may only be aware of the Friday sprint at DrupalCons. Get a lot more out of the event by being involved with the pre and post sprints as well. DrupalCon Austin sprints last from as early as May 30 to as late as June 8th. Likewise DrupalCon Amsterdam sprints will be on from the 27th of September to as late as 5th of October. But DrupalCons are expensive, no? Well, there is no ticket needed to attend on the days when there is only sprinting, that is the pre/post sprint days and the Friday sprint. So if you join at the end, there is 3 days of consecutive working with the Drupal community for no charge where the people you interact with have no conflicting schedules to do or see sessions. How is that for hands-on experience?

Hope to see you at one of these events and other sprints in 2014 and onwards! Learn Drupal by getting involved, it is for the benefit of us all!

While Drupal improves its multilingual features with every version and there were numerous improvements with Drupal 6 and 7 especially, there are still lots of things for which contributed modules are needed, and multilingual support is not consistent (neither in some cases usable) with these modules. There is sizable customization and glue-code building required.

Karsten Frohwein thought to take these problems and organize a group of contributors to take a deep look at them, conceptualize on better solutions and do actual implementation in a concentrated environment. Thankfully, as with great ideas, he got lots of support from companies and individuals interested, so the Internationalization SprintCamp is a go between the 11th and 15th of May 2011 in Berlin. Key contributors are being confirmed one by one, so this event is promising to be a great and high energy one for improving multilingual features and fixing bugs. There is place for up to 20 people, so we are looking for developers who can join and help. Contact Karsten through the Impressum page or leave a comment here with your contact information (such as drupal.org username or user URL).

The sprint is sponsored by the German Drupal-Initiative e. V., Comm-press, undpaul Drupal Development, Acquia and others. We are planning to do couch-surfing to reduce costs and increase fun. If you'd like to help sponsor, contact Karsten.

Ps. we will hang around in the #drupal-i18n IRC channel throughout the sprint, and distribute information and guidance for anybody who'd like to join and help virtually. See http://drupal.org/irc for more information on Drupal's IRC channels.

A few days ago Károly Négyesi (known to most as chx) announced that he organizes a (virtual) cirtical issue queue cleanup event for the 3rd of November, in which people gathered on the #drupal IRC channel will focus on fixing bugs in the critical issue queue.

webchick, desbeers, dvessel, davidstrauss and myself will spend part or all of November 3 with one goal in mind: empty out the critical issue queue for Drupal 6. In case we reach this goal and we have more time, well, there are a number of noncritical bugs and an even bigger number of patches that need work. Come, join the fun on #drupal on irc.freenode.net [...]

A few hours ago, Raincity Studios also announced that they are organizing a (real life) event for the 31th of October, titled the Disguised Drupalist Debugging Day. The Raincity event involves snacks and lots of help even for people starting to get their feet wet in patch rolling.

At last but not least, people from the Netherlands organize their first DrupalJam event for the 16th of November, which additionally to hosting sessions also includes a translation sprint, which admittedly is not direct code getting into Drupal 6, but nonetheless a very good opportunity for people to test every corner of Drupal 6, while translating them, and at the same time using the localization tools heavily, giving them some boost.

Things seem to line up nicely, and seeing Drupal 6 getting more and more stable by the day is very gratifying. In related news, the Drupal 6 development version is so stable, Angie Byron (known to most as webchick) just started her blog site on this version.