Why Should and How Can Companies Give Back to the Drupal Community?

As an open source project, Drupal depends on thousands of people who contribute in many forms, including documentation, code, translation, promotion, mentoring, and donations. Contributing to Drupal is a great way to learn, make connections, and showcase your expertise. If you are new to the world of open source software, this blog post will share three reasons to contribute and two ways to get started.

3 Reasons to Contribute

When we thought about contribution, our first question was: Why do we need to give back? It turns out, the reasons are several.

1. Develop Your Programming Skills

By contributing, your developers can gain programming experience and learn to write more stable code which adheres to standards. Drupal 8 follows the PSR-4 standard. A developer must have a fair acquaintance of it before he or she can be a regular contributor.

A novice programmer can also be a part of the community. Each submission has to be approved by the module or association owner before it gets accepted.

2. Boost Your Company’s Brand

Encouraging the developers on your payroll to contribute to an open source project is a surefire way to show off your skills as an organization. It builds your profile and can potentially get you more work. Here is Grazitti’s Drupal contributor profile:

https://www.drupal.org/grazitti-interactive.

Our contributions include:

• Module building
• Theme design
• Patch and issue fixes

3. Encourage Open Source Culture

Knowledge should spread freely and its growth should come from developing, altering or enriching already existing works on the basis of sharing and collaboration. Contributing to Drupal promotes this culture of openness.

2 Ways to Contribute

You can write documentation, maintain old versions, fix patches, and create new modules and themes. Patches and modules are two quick ways to get your feet wet.

1. Patch

A patch is a file that contains code differences between two sets of files.
By using patches, the development cycle becomes easy. Instead of replacing an entire file that may contain many lines of code, a patch will only change those lines in the file which have been updated.

How to create a patch?

Before you can create a patch, you must have a:

• Valid/activated Drupal account
• Basic knowledge of Git

For other details, follow the instructions on this link

2. Module or Theme

Create your project using Drupal Console and add your functionalities within the project folder.

After you complete working on a project, there are two ways in which you can contribute to Drupal.org.

• Full Projects: Users can download and use these programs.
• Sandbox Projects: Experimental pieces of codes which have not been vetted.

Conclusion

Companies using Drupal as free open source project should certainly give back to showcase their expertise and contribute to the culture of openness. It also makes business sense because contributions can potentially open the doors to new business.

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