Drupal Contribution Weekend 2019

What is Drupal Contrib Weekend?

January 25-27 were the days of Drupal Contribution Weekend, a global event that brought together thousands of Drupal professionals around the world. The term "Contribution" here means the joint international effort of Drupal developers and advocates to design, code and debug the Drupal core and modules, develop UIs, test, author documentation, organize Drupal promotion and support activities. As a rule, national and international Drupal associations, as well as companies and studios working with the system provide financial and organizational support to the event. However, it takes more than such support and enthusiasm to continually develop a global open source project of this scale. Thousands of participants collaborate remotely thanks to the drupal.org IT infrastructure, rules and standards. Drupal Contrib Weekend enables Drupal newbies to learn the features of this infrastructure, the traditions, and make their first steps in the world of Open Source.

What did we do for Drupal Contrib Weekend?

This year we organized this event for the first time. The primary goal was to publish the modules and patches we made so far to Drupal.org, release the new versions of modules we support. We have also filled our office with guests: rookie developers, students, colleagues from other web studios interested in Drupal. The goal was to teach them to work with drupal.org, releases, patches, GIT, port modules to Drupal 8, as well as describe the inner workings of an Open Source project. We had some code, modules and patches created in the context of building and supporting Drupal-powered websites and online stores for our customers.

Gevorg Mkrtychyan, an experienced developer, active member of the Drupal developer community in Russia and author of the Russian Drupal Telegram channel, moderated the master class. Gevorg joined our team quite recently and added much to our Drupal development competencies.

During the master class, Gevorg released the new version of Online checks via Business.ru module to Drupal.org (https://www.drupal.org/project/bcheck). This is a solution that enables compliance with the FZ-54 Federal Law; we use it to integrate online stores powered by Drupal 7 with cassa.business.ru online check service.

During the event, we have also released the first version of the Performance Monitor module for Drupal 8 (https://www.drupal.org/project/perfmon). We use this module to test performance of servers for Drupal sites, compare hosting solutions. The module helps our clients optimize hosting costs and choose the best rates and server configurations. Gevorg is the maintainer of the module's Drupal 8 version. In the near future, we will complete testing it on the reference server and update the module to compare with the reference values.

Another participant of Drupal Contrib Weekend was Andrey Tymchuk, our experienced developer specializing in supporting ecommerce sites powered by Drupal. Andrey released his CDEK API module (https://www.drupal.org/project/cdek_api). The module simplifies integration of Drupal-backed online stores with CDEK delivery service.

Andrey also co-maintains the Simple Sitemap module https://www.drupal.org/project/simple_sitemap. Этот модуль мы используем при поисковой оптимизации (SEO) интернет-магазинов для более быстрой индексации товаров поисковиками. We use this module when doing search engine optimization of online stores: it facilitates products indexation. Andrey developed and committed a patch to support Views, which allows compiling lists of products selected by various parameters to better control inventory indexing by Yandex and Google.

Alexey Zubenko developed a Drupal and Bitrix24 CRM integration module. We implemented Bitrix24 CRM to support business processes and customer service operations for one of the online stores working on Drupal Commerce. The module transfers leads, transactions and contacts to Bitrix24 from Drupal Commerce, syncs inventory between the two. It has not yet been released properly but is available as a sandbox version: https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/alezu/3033545

At the end of the event, having sent up all the commits and published all the releases, we all shared pizzas and enjoyed friendly informal chatting. Here's a short video from the Drupal Contrib Weekend we shot in our office:

Why does the Drupal Coder team support free software, Open Source, and contributes to Drupal?

The idea of free software distributed under various open source licenses is quite appealing because of the underlying cooperation, exchange of experience and ideas with the best developers from all over the world, which translates into further advancement of the technology. In practical terms, advanced technologies allow us and our customers to execute the most ambitious plans, quickly put new products out to the market, create complex and innovative projects, swiftly develop and modify standard solutions. This is the result of collaboration of the best minds and natural selection of technological and organizational solutions within projects such as Drupal, and it is interesting to participate in this exciting global process. This is the viewpoint and attitude shared by all the members of our team.

Roman Agabekov: «Drupal helps us remedy the business pains of our customers, and our contribution is the expression of our gratitude for that».

Andrey Tymchuk: «[Open Source and Drupal give]
1) The opportunity to join a large-scale and highly popular project (in our case, Drupal).
2) The opportunity to share your work with the community and discuss it.
3) The opportunity to show your skills to many developers and clients».

Gevorg Mkrtychyan: «Open Source gives an opportunity to learn the experience shared by specialists from around the world and reciprocate in kind in gratitude. Besides, contributing to Drupal allows identifying problems in solutions, finding better ways, sharing ideas and hearing such expressed by other developers in the context of coding this or that function. Also, it is a chance to correct errors found in the Drupal core and modules jointly with a huge community. And be the part of this community, of course. That's cool)»