The strength of our community is measured by its vitality. It reflects the number of contributions and the participation of all CMS users in its maintenance, development, and innovations.
Contribution is everyone's business
Developers, enthusiasts, agencies, IT services companies... We are all concerned with the state of contribution and sharing our various work. We all know it’s not easy, since our order books are full and it’s tricky to devote time to non-billable activities when we have projects to deliver, according to best practices and on schedule. And yet, everyone’s participation is so important...
200 full-time developers by 2025
For the long term, the CMF Drupal requires more contributions and active participation to stay competitive. 40 developers are currently dedicated to full-time contribution. The Drupal Association aims to ramp up this effort and grow this team to 200 people by 2025.
Contributor guide: https://www.drupal.org/community/contributor-guide
Compared to last year (2021), there are fewer contributions and fewer contributors, but the number of individual contributors remains high (7,000) compared to the number of "company" contributors (1,100). However, we must keep in mind that two-thirds of contributors are sponsored, and maintenance and innovation in Drupal rely mainly on the work of Acquia and a few other agencies, which are very limited in number. The declining level of contribution and the "concentration" of participants seem to undermine the vitality of the community, even though it is up to us to reverse this trend.
Reasons for this trend
There are several explanations for this trend, which we hope is temporary:
- The COVID-19 pandemic made contributing more difficult and/or less appealing;
- We are in a slowdown period of the "Drupal Super Cycle"—after each major version, the work shifts from active development to maintenance.
- Rector led to a decrease in contributions.
If we compare these figures to industry averages for software and service companies, the percentage of individuals and organizations who stopped contributing over the past year isn't that bad. While the attrition rate (1) for software and service companies is considered "satisfactory" at 15%, Drupal’s attrition rate among its top 1,000 contributors is only 7.7%. The attrition rate for Drupal agencies in the Top 250 is only 1.2%.
Our resolutions for 2022–2025
Our team is ready to maintain our useful modules. We are ready to contribute new ones, participate in testing, UX and UI initiatives, as well as translation and testing sprints. To better structure our approach, we have decided to include a dedicated resource in our organization chart, responsible for contributions and communication with the community, especially at the local level. A true cornerstone of the technical team, this experienced Drupal developer will be tasked with:
- Identifying modules developed by the team during our projects that could be of interest to other developers;
- Leading the technical team in charge of contributing a module back;
- Checking development standards and module eligibility;
- Managing contributions;
- Maintaining already contributed modules.
We hope to devote time to this and are available to share our work, co-maintain, and share our experiences.
Our drupal.org page: https://www.drupal.org/bluedrop-ebizproduction
Other areas where you can contribute: UI/UX design, translation, documentation, testing...
(1) This ratio aims to determine the proportion of buyers who have dropped an offer (for whatever reason) compared to the total number of customers over a given period.