FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PORTLAND, Ore., May 11, 2020—The CDC, NIH, and Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders—among many others—depend on the power of Drupal, the largest independent open source content management system, to keep their websites dynamic and secure. But the cancellation of the Drupal Association’s annual keystone fundraising event—originally scheduled for May 2020—put the nonprofit’s finances in jeopardy.

 
COVID-19 has delivered a particularly hard economic hit to non-profits, and the Drupal Association (DA) is no exception,” says Heather Rocker, executive director of the DA. “When we made the decision to cancel DrupalCon North America 2020 for the safety of our attendees, the next question was how to recover those funds so we could continue operations for our community of millions around the world.”

 
Enter #DrupalCares, a global fundraiser conceived with the hopes of bridging the significant funding gap left as a result of the pandemic. While the campaign had a strong start, what really put the fundraising into overdrive was the #DrupalCares match challenge, a $100,000 matching grant for individual contributions funded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and his wife Vanessa. Then a coalition of Drupal businesses came together to match those contributions again—bringing the potential impact up to $300,000. These contributions, together with the contributions from Drupal service providers and end-users, accelerated the campaign dramatically.
 
As of today, May 11, 2020, #DrupalCares has raised $500,000, meeting its 60-day goal in just over 30 days.  Nearly 150 businesses and organizations, along with over 2,000 individual donors and members donated, to reach the goal in record time.  
 
"I'm in awe of how quickly the Drupal community rallied to raise funds for the Drupal Association,” said Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. “With this fundraising campaign behind us, the Drupal Association can refocus on key initiatives such as the Drupal 9 launch next month.

“DrupalCon has been an important reason for Drupal's success,” said Buytaert. “Even though we'll be gathering virtually this summer, I'm very excited that DrupalCon will live on. I'd like to thank everyone who helped us reach our goals—the Drupal community is stronger than ever."
 
While the nonprofit Drupal Association was impacted by COVID-19, the Drupal ecosystem remains strong. As Buytaert wrote in March, open source software seems to be recession-proof.
 
“Open Source has grown to be more secure, more flexible, and more stable than ever before,” said Buytaert. “Today, the benefits of Open Source are even more compelling than during past recessions.”
 
Open source contribution also provides an excellent opportunity for individuals to expand their skills—or even re-skill—during this time of record unemployment. Drupal has demonstrated once again that the power of community and the open source model make projects like Drupal the best possible investment in uncertain times.
 
In addition to the #DrupalCares campaign, the majority of original DrupalCon 2020 sponsors allowed the Association to retain their sponsorship dollars as the event prepares to shift to its first-ever virtual DrupalCon Global 2020.  
  
“Like so many organizations, we had to pivot quickly on a major keystone event, but we also had to pivot quickly on a product launch, as we were planning to introduce Drupal 9, our first major software upgrade in almost five years, at DrupalCon,” says Rocker. “DrupalCon was originally scheduled to host approximately 3,000 attendees in May 2020 in Minneapolis, so we didn’t have time for a ‘wait and see’ approach. I’m grateful to a solid, creative Association staff and the extended leadership of our Drupal community who are willing to do whatever it takes to make this event a success.”
 
“Additionally, Drupal 9 is scheduled to launch on schedule in early June, which is a testament to how dedicated this community is to continuing to be trailblazers—even now, when a delay caused by these world events would have been no surprise,” said Rocker.
 
The #DrupalCares fundraising campaign remains active through May 31, 2020. To learn more about Drupal or make a donation, visit www.Drupal.org.
 
About Drupal and the Drupal Association
Drupal is the open source content management software behind millions of websites and applications, boasting a community of 46,000-plus developers and more than 1.3 million users on Drupal.org. The Drupal Association is the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the Drupal software project, fostering the community, and supporting its growth.
 
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For more information contact Heather Rocker,  heather@association.drupal.org

Pekens Antoine (pekens, pictured here) was doing research on content management systems while running a digital marketing agency, and was exploring Drupal, which he viewed as a “well-thought-out system being developed by a lot of smart people,” and with that he “wasn’t sure if a contribution from myself could make a difference.”

But Drupal and its community held his interest, and in 2018, he attended his first Drupal event—DrupalCon Nashville. He went on to participate in two Drupal Camps as well thus far. It’s been these in-person experiences that left a lasting impression.

“It’s a great feeling to walk up to the maintainer of a project you use every single day and ask them a question,” he says.

This feeling was amplified at the New Jersey Drupal Camp afterparty earlier this year, when he met people and they all spontaneously opened up their computers and worked on a Drupal Core issue that had come up in conversation.

“I realized that I could probably learn a lot about Drupal from the people at the table,” [who he offers a ‘shout out’ to: @traviscarden, @bnjmnm, @tedbow, and @jrockowitz], “and I wanted to do more than build sites with Drupal—I wanted to help build Drupal. They were kind enough to show me their process.

Travis Carden notes: “What I thought was particularly compelling about his story was the fact that he didn't previously view himself as a potential Drupal contributor. He said, ‘I would like to someday be able to contribute.’ But he was eagerly received by the group of us.” 

Their conversation continued on Slack:

Travis Carden I don't know if you already saw it or not, but your Drupal core patch got committed the same night: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3110525 It now appears on your profile: https://www.drupal.org/u/pekens Congratulations, and welcome to the ranks of Core contributors!

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/

NYU Steinhardt has much to offer students—and that was a problem for the school’s website. The site needed to give students a simpler, less overwhelming introduction to the university, while still providing a comprehensive picture of all the school has to offer.

The breadth of available programs at NYU Steinhardt is impressive, but it presented a problem for the school’s website. Over the years, various departments and administrative units had developed their own online look-and-feel and maintained multiple sites. This approach complicated the user experience and made it difficult for prospective students to locate the programs that interested them. This issue became more apparent to the school’s web development team—and its administration—in the wake of efforts to build a responsive layout with standardized elements and to make all the templates digitally accessible. As part of those projects, the team grappled with the reality that each department—and the various sites that formed NYU Steinhardt’s online experience—used different layouts, navigation, and headers. The school needed to convey the variety of its program offerings, as well as provide necessary information for faculty, staff, and alumni. But it needed to do so in a consistent way—one that would help improve the experience for students making a significant and challenging decision.

Today, we're launching a membership drive. You can help by sharing our message and showing your support.

Help grow membership by visiting our campaign page and sharing with your network. We're supporting the global Drupal project and community with your help!  Together, we make the open source community stronger.

Get your 2020 Membership Certificate

Active members can download a personalized certificate now, and one way to contribute to this membership drive is to print out your certificate (or display it on a screen) and share your selfie with us. Tag with #joinDrupalAssoc #OpenSource, #supportOpenSource to show you care.

Our heartfelt thanks to you—members and supporters—for contributing and participating as individuals and organizations.

Ready to help? Share a post like this or craft your own. 

• Tweet

• Post on LinkedIn

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.aclu.org/action/Highlights Client ACLU

Situation

News events led to dramatically increased traffic, causing the ACLU’s donation platform to go down under load, impacting revenue and supporter engagement at a critical time for the organization.

Challenge

Performance tuning under normal circumstances is difficult, but even more so while under extreme load and experiencing downtime with millions of dollars being lost by the hour. 

Solution

The ACLU called on Tag1’s Technical Architecture and Leadership to perform emergency support and rescue work to get the ACLU Action website back online as quickly as possible and to help it withstand even bigger traffic spikes in the future.

Results

3,000% increase in donations from a yearly average of $4mm to $120mm,  $24mm in donations on a single weekend, 57% faster database response times, 900% throughput increase in requests per minute. Systems stay online and perform quickly under extreme loads. 

You can also view the full version of this case study at our website.

Drupal is often spoken about as far more than an open source project, because our global community is vibrant and passionate; a model for other projects to learn from and emulate. There are many ways to be a Drupal ambassador: by mentoring others, by helping people answer why they should use Drupal, and why they should contribute. In addition, I have a few ideas on ways you could be an ambassador for Drupal by sharing about yourself with the global community. By participating, you help put a story behind the people of Drupal, and you show the broader community why the Drupal Association needs support. We'd love to have you involved!

Give a testimonial

".... because of it's wonderful community which has such inspiring contributors spread around the world. Being a member fills me with immense positive energy :)" — Surabhi Gokte (surabhi-gokte)

Get inspiration from the testimonials and share your own.

Be featured on Drupal.org

We're running the banner ad on Drupal.org - visible only to users who don't have an active membership. You may see these banners throughout the year (usually for a week-long run) if you visit without being logged in. To participate, email me or chat on Slack (lizzjoy). 

Drupal.org banner featuring Baddý Breidert (baddysonja).

Drupal.org banner featuring Christian Schnabl (snable).

MemberMondays

From this month's #MemberMondays.

This month, we've launched social posts about a different member each week. We're calling it #MemberMondays. You can share about yourself in this questionnaire.

I hope you participate— it would be wonderful to share about you with the global community. If you are interested, but feel you don’t have time or are hesitating, let us know.

What’s new in Drupal 8.8.0?

The last normal feature release of Drupal 8 includes a stable Media Library as well as several improvements to workspaces and migrations. The new experimental Claro administration theme brings a fresh look to site management. This is also the first release to come with native Composer support.

Download Drupal 8.8.0

Stable Media Library

The Media Library module allows easy reuse of images, documents, videos, and other assets across the site. It is integrated into content forms and seamlessly fits into CKEditor. You can upload media right from the library and even reuse a combination of uploaded and existing media. Media Library was previously included with Drupal core as a beta experimental module.

New experimental administration theme

The Claro administration theme was added to Drupal core with beta experimental stability. The new theme is clean, accessible, and powerful. Administration pages are more touch-friendly, and color combinations and contrasts are more accessible.

Significant improvements to Workspaces

It is now possible to define hierarchical workspaces (such as preparing a "New Year's" issue for a magazine under the "winter issue", while both receive changes to be deployed). Workspaces can now work with Content Moderation, and path alias changes can also be staged.

Native Composer support included

Drupal 8.8.0 is the first release to include native Composer support without reliance on third-party projects to set up Drupal with its dependencies. New sites can be created using a one-line command.

Migration improvements

The multilingual migration path is still experimental, but has received various updates. This includes handling of vocabulary language settings, term language information, and localization. Modules can now specify whether migrations provided by them are finished or not finished to help audit completeness of available migrations.

New experimental Help Topics module

The existing help system is module based, whereas users intend to complete tasks, not use modules. A new task-based Help Topics beta experimental module has been added to bring in-Drupal help to the next level.

The way to Drupal 9

Drupal 8.8 is the last minor release of Drupal 8 to include significant new features or deprecations prior to 9.0.0. The next (and final) minor release, 8.9, is planned to be a long-term support release that will include all the same changes as Drupal 9.0. It will not contain significant new features compared to 8.8.0, although existing experimental modules may become stable, and small API and UX improvements can still be added.

Drupal 8.9.0's planned release date is June 3, 2020, and our target release date for Drupal 9.0.0 is the same day. Most Drupal 9 preparation steps can be done on your Drupal 8 site, custom code and contributed modules now.

What does this mean for me? Drupal 8 site owners

Update to 8.8.0 to continue receiving bug fixes and prepare for 9.0.0 (or 8.9.0). The next bug-fix release (8.8.1) is scheduled for January 8, 2020. (See the release schedule overview for more information.) As of this release, sites on Drupal 8.6 will no longer receive security coverage. (Drupal 8.7 will continue receiving security fixes until June 3, 2020.)

Note that all Drupal 8.8.0 sites (new installs and updates) now require at least PHP 7.0.8.

Updating your site from 8.7.10 to 8.8.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.7.8 to 8.7.9. Drupal 8.8.0 also has updates to several dependencies. Modules, themes, and translations may need updates for these and other changes in this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site. Read the 8.8.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your site.

Drupal 7 site owners

Drupal 7 is fully supported by the community until November 2021, and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout this time. From November 2021 until at least November 2024, the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support program will be offered by vendors.

The migration path for monolingual Drupal 7 sites is stable, as is the built-in migrationuser interface. For multilingual sites, most outstanding issues have been resolved. Please keep testing and reporting any issues you may find.

Translation, module, and theme contributors

Minor releases like Drupal 8.8.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features.

Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 8.7.x and earlier will be compatible with 8.8.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. Read the 8.8.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your modules and themes.

This release has advanced the Drupal project significantly and represents the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and contributors from various organizations, as well as testers from the Minor release beta testing program. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 8.8.0!

Giving Tuesday (known online as #GivingTuesday) is the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, held on December 3, 2019. What began in the States has grown over the years into an international day dedicated to charitable giving at the beginning of the holiday season, whereby hundreds of millions of people give, collaborate and celebrate generosity.

Coincidentally, givingTuesday.org is built using Drupal! 

At the Drupal Association, we’ve decided to participate for the first time this year. Knowing the Drupal Community likes to have fun and delve into challenges — such as the ever-popular Trivia Night held during DrupalCons — our staff collaborated to create a trivia challenge never before seen, with Drupal project and product questions, Association facts and more. 

We challenge you to take the quiz on #GivingTuesday December 3rd, and to share with friends to see who can crack this code! Note: Not a literal code! Visit Drupal.org/giving-tuesday-2019 on Tuesday for the link.

We’ll update the leaderboard and congratulate players throughout the day on December 3! 

Thanks in advance for playing, and we encourage you to post your trivia score on social media; this may be our most challenging trivia game yet! 

We hope you'll take a minute to support the Drupal Association and join/renew membership or donate on this international day of giving. At the end of Giving Tuesday, we’ll announce three leaderboard winners: who has won the trivia, who donated the most, and who referred the most new members. The top 10 winners shown on each leaderboard will be entered to win a handcrafted Drupal prize (hint: it might be pictured in this photo)! 

#GivingTuesday

photo from DrupalCon Seattle opening reception by Hussain Abbas (hussainweb)

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from OneShoe's blog. The following are results from the 2019 Drupal Business Survey conducted by One Shoe and Exove, in partnership with the Drupal Association.

The annual Drupal Business Survey is an initiative of Drupal agencies One Shoe and Exove, and was published in 2016 for the first time. The survey aims to gather valuable insights from Drupal business leaders to identify opportunities and challenges for the Drupal market. This year, the survey asked Drupal business leaders from all over the world about their experiences with selling Drupal projects, their vision on community contributions and their expectations toward Drupal 9.

In total, 118 C-level Drupal agency leaders participated in the 2019 edition of the Drupal Business Survey. These leaders have a total of 118 offices, of which the majority (72 offices) are located in Europe and 36 in the United States.

43% of the respondents are CEOs and 35.6% of the respondents are founders of Drupal businesses, mostly working at mid-size Drupal agencies with between 11 and 50 employees (33.9%). The majority of the companies have been in business for more than four years (89.8%).

How is Drupal business doing?

The news is positive for business – the Drupal project pipeline has grown or stayed at the same level as the previous year whilst the average deal size has increased. Drupal project win rates have stayed roughly at the same level and future of Drupal project pipeline is predicted steady based on this year’s responses.

Each year the respondents are asked about their Drupal project pipeline, average deal size and project win rate, as well as their expectations for next year. Half of the respondents said that their Drupal project pipeline grew and when compared to last years results, even more than expected. One third of the business leaders responded that their pipeline has stayed approximately the same and only 16.9% stated that their project pipeline shrank.

Average deal size has also grown, according to majority of the respondents (65%), and only about 7% answered that their deal size shrunk in 2018.

Popular industries for Drupal projects

Drupal is used for endless types of digital solutions: from easy-to-manage sites to large-scale portals and platforms. As a result, you can find Drupal projects in all kinds of industries. Each year the respondents of the Drupal Business Survey are asked about the type of projects they completed in the past year, and industries in which they use Drupal to create digital experiences.

Interestingly, this year the category 'Education' is added for the first time after respondents in the previous edition indicated they missed this category. Education is the most popular industry in which Drupal projects are implemented this year.

We asked this question also in previous years and when comparing results, we see some differences. Travel & Tourism became a more popular industry in Drupal project implementation with 330% growth when compared to the 2018 Drupal Business Survey results. Furthermore, Telecom, Sports and Logistics & Support grew their popularity whilst Consumer Electronics, Consultancy and Construction decreased popularity in Drupal projects implementation according to the survey data.

Top 3 industries which became more popular compared to 2018:

• Travel & Tourism (+330%)
• Telecom (+77.78%)
• Sports (+77.78%)
• Logistics & Support (+72.73%)

Top 3 industries with fewer Drupal projects compared to 2018:

• Consumer Electronics (-59.09%)
• Consultancy (-37.74%)
• Construction (-37.50%)

‘Contributing to Drupal should be a no-brainer’

One of the distinguishing factors and forces behind Drupal's success is the large and active community. For a long time, the slogan for Drupal has been "Come for the software, stay for the community.” Dries Buytaert each year publishes the ‘Who sponsors Drupal development?’ report. According to the 2018–2019 edition, small-to-medium-sized Drupal businesses (fewer than 100 employees) contribute frequently, while larger full-service agencies are not actively contributing to Drupal.

According to the Drupal Business Survey, 111 out of the 118 businesses contribute to Drupal and only 7 businesses don’t. What’s the vision of Drupal’s agency leaders about the subject of contributing to Drupal? How do they contribute, and why (not)?

The Drupal businesses from the survey contribute in many different ways. It varies from non-technical contributions, like sponsoring events and organising events such as MeetUps and DrupalCamps, to improving Drupal’s documentation or development (contributing modules and patches). Reasons for contributing are, among others, because it feels like ‘the right thing to do’, because of branding and marketing reasons, or in order to give the developers a sense of the community:

“Drupal has given a lot to our company, so it is only fair to give back. Also, we see that the Drupal business community is not that well served, so it is an easy choice for us to contribute to (besides technical stuff).”

“Without contributions, the Drupal project wouldn't exist. It should be a no-brainer.”,

“ I wouldn't have made a career in Drupal if others wouldn't have contributed before; it's a give and take and everyone should do so.”

I believe in supporting the community that supports me and provides the basis for my income. Also, there are side-benefits to contributing. My contributions have helped me win clients.”

Limited time and resources

Even though the vast majority of agencies are aware of the importance of contributing to Drupal, they also face difficulties combining the pro-bono contributions with their day-to-day business. The analysis shows that those who don’t contribute are either sole entrepreneurs or are working at a Drupal company with more than 100 employees. Almost all respondents saying that their business doesn’t contribute, explain that the reason is that they don’t have the time and resources to do so: “In a resource limited business, contribution is difficult to balance with the bottom line. We do what we can. However, the teams are all encouraged to be vocal advocates of Drupal on all Social Media platforms, challenging misconceptions wherever they occur.” Someone else suggests: “Maybe introduce paid development for updating, testing and maintaining core and most used contributed modules.”

Does size matter?

When we compare the size of the Drupal companies with the kind of Drupal contributions, we see that:

• The larger the Drupal business is in terms of employees, the more often they financially support the Drupal project by – for example – sponsoring an event and/or making donations.
• Also, larger Drupal businesses tend to contribute to developing (contributing modules, patches, documentation or bug reports) more than smaller ones.
• The smaller the business, the more often they share knowledge with other users (User Support).
• Except that, there is no significant difference between the size of the Drupal companies and other types of contributions they make to the Drupal project. All different sizes of organisations contribute in the form of translations, marketing, testing, and contributing to design & usability.

Businesses expect easier Drupal upgrades starting with D9

Drupal 9 is targeted for release in June 2020. We asked the Drupal business leaders what their expectations are toward Drupal 9. The general trend among companies is ‘Finally no hard upgrade path anymore!’ One respondent says: ‘We hope the upgrade path will be smooth, and it will be easier to justify the investment of upgrading.’

“[I expect] it will become easier to do the operation things, as update core, modules etc. Better media handling and user interface, that it doesn't have this large jumps on functionality changes from one version to another - so the upgrades from 8 to 9, 9 to 10 and so on can go much much smoother than before.”

“[I expect] that we don’t have to reimplement all our customers solutions the way we had to from earlier solutions. I expect that when we have upgraded all our solutions to the latest version of Drupal 8.X, the upgrade to Drupal 9 needs to be smooth and without any major rewriting of code. When upgrading our ecommerce solutions from D6 -> D7 and D7 -> D8, it almost killed our business. We had to basically reimplement the solutions (not upgrade them) and the clients were not willing to pay the actual cost. So we had to invest a lot of money into those upgraded. We are not willing to do the same for D8 -> D9.”

Business leaders also express their desire for a better interface and a UX enhancements: ‘I hope that D8 will provide a better admin UI and UX, and an improved preview mode.’ Another one says: ‘I hope for focus on the end user experience.’

The Drupal community has noted the user experience needs and there is a specific Admin UI modernisation strategic initiative going on – for more information, see https://www.drupal.org/about/strategic-initiatives/admin-ui-js

However, a number of owners also express their doubts. One respondent states:

“Many clients are still on Drupal 7 without a plan (or desire) for Drupal 8, there is some surprise that Drupal 9 is already on the way. Some may be waiting for Drupal 9 before moving anyway. The D7-D8 move is seen as such a big one that projects may come to a natural end or move away from Drupal before clients ever get to D8 or D9.”

“We think it will be hard to convince people to migrate from Drupal7 to Drupal9. On the other hand we think that project size will continue to grow.”

The comments about Drupal 7 show that the system is still in wide use and there is a threshold for the clients to upgrade to later versions. The updates have been laborious projects in the past, and now businesses expect this issue will be mitigated with the new release cycle and the release of Drupal 9.

More ease of use of Drupal

We asked the Drupal business leaders what developments they hope to see in the coming years regarding Drupal in general.

The answers given by the respondents were varied, ranging from making Drupal development easier to making Drupal more suitable (again) for small and mid-size projects. However, most of the answers were about the user-friendliness of Drupal: 26% of all the answers had to do with Drupal’s user experience for developers as well as administrators, editors, content managers and end users. Or, as one respondent stated it: “Continued ease-of-use for both semi-technicals/semi-professionals as well as professional developers and UX and UI designers.”

“A better out-of-the box user experience (in terms of design, media handling & editing, for example). Improved admin experience - e.g. react-based admin interface.”

“I hope that Drupal is going to have a better and more modern UI/UX for the clients, ease to integrate Drupal as API first/headless, from a DX perspective continue to use OOP and modern methods. Ease to do functional tests. Ease to update modules/core with automatic process.”

The Drupal Business Survey results indicate that businesses are eagerly waiting for the first versions with a radically improved admin user interface. This is something that has already been taken into account; see the Drupal community’s strategic initiative.

The second thing that the respondents mention is that they hope the features and capabilities of Drupal will continue to improve or expand (10% of the answers):

“Continue to develop more content-friendly toolkits/features, expand upon configuration management processes/workflows”

“We see more out of the box features in the platform and more tools suited for enterprises.”

“Closer to a microservices CMS, allowing me to pick the bits I need/want.”

Conclusion

The survey shows that Drupal business is doing well, with slight growth in project pipeline and more substantial growth in average deal size. Drupal is used for various types of digital solutions. However the most popular industry for Drupal project implementation is Education based on this year’s survey results. Other top industries include Charities & Non-profit and Government & Public Administration. The fastest growing industry in terms of the number of Drupal implementations this year is Travel & Tourism, with a growth of 330%, followed by Telecom (+77,78%), Sports (+77,78%) and Logistics & Support (+72,73%).

Contributions to Drupal have remained active, as 111 out of the 118 businesses taking part in the survey report that they contribute to Drupal. The most common ways of contributing include development as well as sponsoring and organising events. The report shows that those who cannot contribute to Drupal are either sole entrepreneurs or are working at a company with over 100 employees, facing challenges in combining pro bono work with day-to-day business.

Drupal business leaders share various hopes on the development of Drupal. The most common ones include improved dev/editor/user experience, more/better features and ease of updates. Expectations towards the upgrade to Drupal 9 are mostly optimistic, the only thing that businesses shared was their concerns that customers may want to move away from Drupal because of the difficult upgrade from 7 to 8.

As one of the business leaders states: “Agency leaders play a key role in growing the Drupal community. This survey provides a great way for us to start working together. Next, we need to take the results and come up with strategies for growth!” The findings of this survey – and possible strategies for growth – were discussed at the Drupal CEO Dinner during DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019, where more than 60 Drupal Business leaders from all over the world came together.

-----

See the 2018 survey results.

For more information, please contact Janne Kalliola (jannekalliola) or Michel van Velde (michel-van-velde).

About Exove

Exove delivers digital growth. We help our clients to grow their digital business by designing and building solutions with agile manner, service design methodologies, and open technologies. Our clients include Sanoma, Fiskars, Neste, Informa, Trimble, and Finnlines. We serve also start-up companies, unions and public sector. Exove has offices in Helsinki, Oulu and Tampere, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; and London, United Kingdom. For more information, please visit www.exove.com.

About One Shoe

One Shoe is an integrated advertising and digital agency with more than 10 years experience in Drupal. With more than 40 specialists, One Shoe combines strategy, UX, design, advertising, web and mobile development to deliver unique results for international clients like DHL, Shell, Sanofi, LeasePlan, MedaPharma and many more. For more information, please visit www.oneshoe.com.

About the Drupal Association

The Drupal Association is the not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal project, the community and its growth. The Drupal Association helps the global Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration at Drupal.org. For more information, please visit drupal.org/association.

Our staff will be at Booth 3 ready to talk with you about the Drupal community, how you can get more involved as a contributor, and to hear about your needs. 

Make sure you....

✓ pick up some Drupal stickers

✓ show your support by signing up for membership or partner programs

Session highlights

• Tuesday at 16h15, in G107, attend the Drupal Association Townhall with our Executive Director Heather Rocker (hrocker), CTO Tim Lehnen (hestenet), and our Board Chair Adam Goodman (adamgoodman). We'll be taking questions and diving into topics important to the community.
• Wednesday at 11h30, in G107, we're holding our public board meeting. All are welcome to attend!
   
• Also on Wednesday, if you're curious about what the Drupal.org Engineering Team is working on, come to the Drupal.org Infrastructure Update session in G103 at 17h15.

See you soon!

The Drupal Association collaborated on Automatic Updates, one of the Drupal Core Strategic Initiatives that was funded by the European Commission. We are excited to partner with MTech, Tag1 Consulting, and the European Commission FOSSA program on this new initiative and share information with you about its features.

Automatic Updates has three components.

Public safety messaging

This feature pulls a feed of alerts from Drupal.org directly into Drupal's administrative interface. This helps ensure that critical Public service announcements (PSA) or Security Advisories (SA) from the Drupal security team will be seen directly by site owners. 

• This provides yet another communication mechanism before an update so site owners can verify they are ready for an upcoming update, before it lands.

• The feed of alerts comes directly from the feed of PSAs and SAs that the security team and release managers are already producing. 

• This will vastly increase the ability of the Drupal project to get the word out about critical and highly critical updates - ensuring the community can respond fast. 

Readiness checks, or “Pre-flight” checks

These automated and extensible readiness checks are built into the Automatic Updates system to verify that a site doesn't have any blockers that would prevent it from being updated.

• These checks are slated to run at least every 6 hours on a site via Drupal Cron and will inform site owners if they are ready to auto update their site.

• Examples of the readiness checks include:

  • Is the site is running on a read-only file system?

  • Have any files included in the update been modified from what they should be? 

  • Does the site still need to run database updates, etc.? 

There’s about 8 or 9 of these readiness checks and some are warnings (Cron isn’t running frequently enough to automatically update the site in a timely manner) and some are errors (the file system is read-only). Warnings won’t stop automatic updates, but errors will.

In place updates

Finally, the key pillar of the automatic updates feature is the update itself. Drupal.org generates a signed and secure package of files which can be overlaid atop the existing site files in order to apply the update. 

• This update package is downloaded as a signed zip file from Drupal.org. The automatic updates module on the site then compares the signature of the zip file using drupal/php-signify, which is based on BSD’s Signify and libsodium to verify the package.

• It then proceeds to backup the files about to be updated and updates the site.

• If all goes well, the site is upgraded. If something fails, the backup is restored.

• Many workflows are supported and you can customize how the updates are performed. Updates can flow through your CI/CD system, be staged for review and approval, and or automatically go live.

In the past few weeks, the Drupal Association has been invited to participate in TagTeamTalks, a new recorded talk series about various tech projects supporting the Drupal project. This bi-weekly format provides real-time shared collaboration and informative discussions. 

TagTeamTalk launched its webinar focused on Automatic Updates this week. The group dives deep into the nuts and bolts of Drupal's groundbreaking Automatic Updates feature, and the strategic initiative sponsored by the Drupal Association, MTech, Tag1 Consulting, and the European Commission. Guests include Preston So (prestonso), Contributing Editor at Tag1 and Moderator of the TagTeamTalks; Michael Meyers (michalemeyers), Managing Director of Tag1; Lucas Hedding (heddn), Senior Architect and Data and Application Migration Expert at Tag1; Fabian Franz (Fabianx), Senior Technical Architect and Performance Lead at Tag1; and Tim Lehnen (hestenet) CTO at the Drupal Association. Read the TagTeamTalks blog.

“Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your brand and capabilities - it has been a really powerful approach for the organizations that I’ve worked for,” said Michael. “The goal is to give our team an opportunity to talk about the cool things they’re working on and excited about and to share it with people. It helps get the word out about the latest developments in the open source communities we contribute to, and it promotes Tag1’s expertise - it helps us recruit new hires, and drives new business.” 

Meyers is the Managing Director of Tag1, and has been involved with the Drupal community for over 15 years. He was Founder and CTO of the first venture backed drupal based startup, CTO of the first Top 100 website on Drupal, and VP of Developer Relations at Acquia before joining Tag1.  “The great thing about TagTeamTalks is that it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of effort or energy. Our engineers are subject matter experts. We decide on a topic for the week, spend 15 minutes brainstorming a rough outline as a guide, and then record the talk. We don’t want to be rehearsed. The conversation is what makes it dynamic and enjoyable for us to do, and for people to listen to. And, the team loves it because they want to talk about what they are working on, and this format doesn’t take a lot of time away from what they enjoy doing most - writing code.” 

Hedding is one of the top 20 most active contributors to Drupal 8, and is also the Drupal Core Migrate Sub-system Maintainer, a core contribution mentor, and a D.O. project application reviewer. “Auto Updates has long been one of the most requested Drupal features, it is a capability the platform really needs that will help everyone using Drupal. Now that the alpha is available, we need to early adopters to start using it, we need feedback so we can continue to improve it. We also need to get more people involved in development, and we need to raise more money from organizations to support the project - it might sound like a simple feature, but it is actually really complex and requires a lot of effort. TagTeamTalks are a great way to get the word out and to enlist support from the Drupal community.”

Lucas added, “The European Commission provided generous funding for this initiative. The focus has been exclusively or largely around the European Commission’s features and functionality. The funding is running out very soon. There is a need for other people to help continue to build Automatic Updates by adding the features they need with their developers or by providing funding.”  

“It is critical for us to spread the message and make that call to action; that this is a community-driven effort and that without continued community support, it is not going to be as successful or as robust in the timeframe that we would like,” said Meyers.

The first year of funding from the European Commission provided for readiness checking, delivery of update 'quasi-patches,’ and a robust package signing system. The focus of this first phase of the Automatic Updates initiative has been on support for security updates in particular. 

In the second phase, as yet unfunded, we hope to extend this foundational work in the following ways:

• Provide more robust composer support. The first phase of the automatic updates project should be compatible with composer-ready sites, but as the site’s composer.json file and vendor directory of a site change from the default, then more controls and though need to be implemented. 

• Create an A/B front-end controller for the site being updated to further increase our confidence in the success of the update, allow for additional post-update testing and provide an easy mechanism to roll-back the update. This is also when updates will be able to move into Drupal core from the contrib project.

• Expand to more types of updates (particularly further support for contrib updates), and also handle multiple updates in a row, for sites that are several versions behind. 

To accomplish all of this, we will continue to seek more funding and more partners. 

“I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes now that we have the first release out, ” said Hedding. “ There’s a larger community needed to get this initiative completed.”

The initial alpha version of the Automatic Updates module can be tested by the community right now. The plan is to: demonstrate Automatic Updates at DrupalCon Amsterdam this month, complete the scope of the funded work by the European Commission by the end of this year, and stabilize Automatic Updates by DrupalCon Minneapolis in May 2020. 

“The Automatic Updates initiative is designed to reduce the friction in keeping a Drupal site secure and up-to-date. The team behind the initiative is architecting a robust system, secure by design, and building components that can be shared with the broader PHP community,” said Tim Lehnen.

Many thanks to MTech, Tag1 Consulting, and the European Commission FOSSA program for funding this initiative. The Drupal Association is proud to be a part of this initiative.

You will notice that, along with thousands of websites around the world, Drupal.org posted a banner message this week declaring we are opting in to a global Digital Climate Strike on 20th September.

Will @drupal website add the #DigitalClimateStrike banner? @baluertl requested it and mocked up a visual... https://t.co/XcIj9Gf173 pic.twitter.com/Zl0ctyc7G6

— ClimateAction.tech (@climateActTech) September 18, 2019

Of course, because Drupal.org is an essential service to over a million websites around the world, we have to be sure that we still allow them all to continue to access resources here. As such, the full page banner that will appear on websites on the 20th September will be configured to allow visitors to cancel it, should they need to.

Fundamentally, the Drupal Association wants to be a good steward of the environment and recognizes the impact that technology has on environmental issues. We are committed to exploring ways for the Drupal project to reduce its carbon footprint and to become a more eco-friendly platform. Today, we stand with others in the technology industry to educate and inform the general public about some of the ways that the tech industry can support environmental causes.

If the environmental sustainability of Drupal websites is a subject as close to your hearts as it is to ours, you might like to know that recently a #sustainable Slack channel was created for discussion on the topic.

Many thanks to Kaleem Clarkson (kclarkson) and his team for organizing a great DrupalCamp Atlanta. I had a time of learning, connecting and being inspired!

I started my day at DrupalCamp Atlanta by participating in the workshop “Introduction to Drupal,” led by longtime Drupal community member Doug Vann (dougvann). Joining me was Rudy Dodier, from Platform.sh. Doug covered everything from the history of Drupal, to setting up a basic website to how the word “system” in Content Management System can be an acronym for: Saves You Some Time Energy Money.

I took copious notes, as I continue to connect the dots to the power of the Drupal project - to how it is leading a digital transformation across industries. I absorbed it all, and was eager to learn more. I met other developers and individuals who contribute so much to the Drupal project and to the Drupal community. From my conversations with Ray Saltini (rgs) and Mike Anello (ultimike) to Suzanne Dergacheva (pixelite), I was struck by the level of commitment demonstrated by the community. You'll get a sense for this in Suzanne's slides for her Growing the Drupal Community talk.

Heather Rocker (hrocker) also attended and presented at the Career Fair. She spoke about the importance of the Association’s initiative on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and the benefits that come from actively recruiting and welcoming new individuals (especially those from underrepresented communities) to lend their skills to the project.

I realize the extensive number of stories that are within this vast and passionate community, and I am excited to promote and talk about them. I am looking forward to being a communications and marketing advocate for the Drupal community, the Drupal project and the Drupal Association. From the specific needs of developers, to the importance of broadening our audience, to the necessity of career fairs to bring students on the Drupal train, and to the need for marketing to grow Drupal adoption, I heard and learned so much in a short visit to Atlanta. But, what impressed me as much as the day was the contagious enthusiasm for what the community is doing and for what it can accomplish!

The DrupalCamp Atlanta Leadership Team, without whom the event wouldn't have been possible!

Thanks to everyone who came out for #DCATL this year! We loved meeting y'all. Let's continue to grow and support the @drupal community! pic.twitter.com/q9IgHjVRkA

— DrupalCamp Atlanta (@DrupalCamp_ATL) September 14, 2019

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

An in-depth analysis of how Drupal's development was sponsored between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.

The past years, I've examined Drupal.org's contribution data to understand who develops Drupal, how diverse the Drupal community is, how much of Drupal's maintenance and innovation is sponsored, and where that sponsorship comes from.

You can look at the 2016 report, the 2017 report, and the 2018 report. Each report looks at data collected in the 12-month period between July 1st and June 30th.

This year's report shows that:

• Both the recorded number of contributors and contributions have increased.
• Most contributions are sponsored, but volunteer contributions remains very important to Drupal's success.
• Drupal's maintenance and innovation depends mostly on smaller Drupal agencies and Acquia. Hosting companies, multi-platform digital marketing agencies, large system integrators and end users make fewer contributions to Drupal.
• Drupal's contributors have become more diverse, but are still not diverse enough.

Methodology What are Drupal.org issues?

"Issues" are pages on Drupal.org. Each issue tracks an idea, feature request, bug report, task, or more. See https://www.drupal.org/project/issues for the list of all issues.

For this report, we looked at all Drupal.org issues marked "closed" or "fixed" in the 12-month period from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. The issues analyzed in this report span Drupal core and thousands of contributed projects, across all major versions of Drupal.

What are Drupal.org credits?

In the spring of 2015, after proposing initial ideas for giving credit, Drupal.org added the ability for people to attribute their work in the Drupal.org issues to an organization or customer, or mark it the result of volunteer efforts.

A screenshot of an issue comment on Drupal.org. You can see that jamadar worked on this patch as a volunteer, but also as part of his day job working for TATA Consultancy Services on behalf of their customer, Pfizer.

Drupal.org's credit system is truly unique and groundbreaking in Open Source and provides unprecedented insights into the inner workings of a large Open Source project. There are a few limitations with this approach, which we'll address at the end of this report.

What is the Drupal community working on?

In the 12-month period between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019, 27,522 issues were marked "closed" or "fixed", a 13% increase from the 24,447 issues in the 2017-2018 period.

In total, the Drupal community worked on 3,474 different Drupal.org projects this year compared to 3,229 projects in the 2017-2018 period — an 8% year over year increase.

The majority of the credits are the result of work on contributed modules:

Compared to the previous period, contribution credits increased across all project types:

The most notable change is the large jump in "non-product credits": more and more members in the community started tracking credits for non-product activities such as organizing Drupal events (e.g. DrupalCamp Delhi project, Drupal Developer Days, Drupal Europe and DrupalCon Europe), promoting Drupal (e.g. Drupal pitch deck or community working groups (e.g. Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, Governance Working Group).

While some of these increases reflect new contributions, others are existing contributions that are newly reported. All contributions are valuable, whether they're code contributions, or non-product and community-oriented contributions such as organizing events, giving talks, leading sprints, etc. The fact that the credit system is becoming more accurate in recognizing more types of Open Source contribution is both important and positive.

Who is working on Drupal?

For this report's time period, Drupal.org's credit system received contributions from 8,513 different individuals and 1,137 different organizations — a meaningful increase from last year's report.

Consistent with previous years, approximately 51% of the individual contributors received just one credit. Meanwhile, the top 30 contributors (the top 0.4%) account for 19% of the total credits. In other words, a relatively small number of individuals do the majority of the work. These individuals put an incredible amount of time and effort into developing Drupal and its contributed projects:

Rank Username Issues 1 kiamlaluno 1610 2 jrockowitz 756 3 alexpott 642 4 RajabNatshah 616 5 volkswagenchick 519 6 bojanz 504 7 alonaoneill 489 8 thalles 488 9 Wim Leers 437 10 DamienMcKenna 431 11 Berdir 424 12 chipway 356 13 larowlan 324 14 pifagor 320 15 catch 313 16 mglaman 277 17 adci_contributor 274 18 quietone 266 19 tim.plunkett 265 20 gaurav.kapoor 253 21 RenatoG 246 22 heddn 243 23 chr.fritsch 241 24 xjm 238 25 phenaproxima 238 26 mkalkbrenner 235 27 gvso 232 28 dawehner 219 29 e0ipso 218 30 drumm 205

Out of the top 30 contributors featured this year, 28 were active contributors in the 2017-2018 period as well. These Drupalists' dedication and continued contribution to the project has been crucial to Drupal's development.

It's also important to recognize that most of the top 30 contributors are sponsored by an organization. Their sponsorship details are provided later in this article. We value the organizations that sponsor these remarkable individuals, because without their support, it could be more challenging for these individuals to be in the top 30.

It's also nice to see two new contributors make the top 30 this year — Alona O'neill with sponsorship from Hook 42 and Thalles Ferreira with sponsorship from CI&T. Most of their credits were the result of smaller patches (e.g. removing deprecated code, fixing coding style issues, etc) or in some cases non-product credits rather than new feature development or fixing complex bugs. These types of contributions are valuable and often a stepping stone towards towards more in-depth contribution.

How much of the work is sponsored?

Issue credits can be marked as "volunteer" and "sponsored" simultaneously (shown in jamadar's screenshot near the top of this post). This could be the case when a contributor does the necessary work to satisfy the customer's need, in addition to using their spare time to add extra functionality.

For those credits with attribution details, 18% were "purely volunteer" credits (8,433 credits), in stark contrast to the 65% that were "purely sponsored" (29,802 credits). While there are almost four times as many "purely sponsored" credits as "purely volunteer" credits, volunteer contribution remains very important to Drupal.

Both "purely volunteer" and "purely sponsored" credits grew — "purely sponsored" credits grew faster in absolute numbers, but for the first time in four years "purely volunteer" credits grew faster in relative numbers.

The large jump in volunteer credits can be explained by the community capturing more non-product contributions. As can be seen on the graph below, these non-product contributions are more volunteer-centric.

Who is sponsoring the work?

Now that we've established that the majority of contributions to Drupal are sponsored, let's study which organizations contribute to Drupal. While 1,137 different organizations contributed to Drupal, approximately 50% of them received four credits or less. The top 30 organizations (roughly the top 3%) account for approximately 25% of the total credits, which implies that the top 30 companies play a crucial role in the health of the Drupal project.

Top contributing organizations based on the number of issue credits.

While not immediately obvious from the graph above, a variety of different types of companies are active in Drupal's ecosystem:

Category Description Traditional Drupal businesses Small-to-medium-sized professional services companies that primarily make money using Drupal. They typically employ fewer than 100 employees, and because they specialize in Drupal, many of these professional services companies contribute frequently and are a huge part of our community. Examples are Hook42, Centarro, The Big Blue House, Vardot, etc. Digital marketing agencies Larger full-service agencies that have marketing-led practices using a variety of tools, typically including Drupal, Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, WordPress, etc. They tend to be larger, with many of the larger agencies employing thousands of people. Examples are Wunderman, Possible and Mirum. System integrators Larger companies that specialize in bringing together different technologies into one solution. Example system agencies are Accenture, TATA Consultancy Services, Capgemini and CI&T. Hosting companies Examples are Acquia, Rackspace, Pantheon and Platform.sh. End users Examples are Pfizer or bio.logis Genetic Information Management GmbH.

A few observations:

• Almost all of the sponsors in the top 30 are traditional Drupal businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Only five companies in the top 30 — Pfizer, Google, CI&T, bio.logis and Acquia — are not traditional Drupal businesses. The traditional Drupal businesses are responsible for almost 80% of all the credits in the top 30. This percentage goes up if you extend beyond the top 30. It's fair to say that Drupal's maintenance and innovation largely depends on these traditional Drupal businesses.
• The larger, multi-platform digital marketing agencies are barely contributing to Drupal. While more and more large digital agencies are building out Drupal practices, no digital marketing agencies show up in the top 30, and hardly any appear in the entire list of contributing organizations. While they are not required to contribute, I'm frustrated that we have not yet found the right way to communicate the value of contribution to these companies. We need to incentivize each of these firms to contribute back with the same commitment that we see from traditional Drupal businesses
• The only system integrator in the top 30 is CI&T, which ranked 4th with 795 credits. As far as system integrators are concerned, CI&T is a smaller player with approximately 2,500 employees. However, we do see various system integrators outside of the top 30, including Globant, Capgemini, Sapient and TATA Consultancy Services. In the past year, Capgemini almost quadrupled their credits from 46 to 196, TATA doubled its credits from 85 to 194, Sapient doubled its credits from 28 to 65, and Globant kept more or less steady with 41 credits. Accenture and Wipro do not appear to contribute despite doing a fair amount of Drupal work in the field.
• Hosting companies also play an important role in our community, yet only Acquia appears in the top 30. Rackspace has 68 credits, Pantheon has 43, and Platform.sh has 23. I looked for other hosting companies in the data, but couldn't find any. In general, there is a persistent problem with hosting companies that make a lot of money with Drupal not contributing back. The contribution gap between Acquia and other hosting companies has increased, not decreased.
• We also saw three end users in the top 30 as corporate sponsors: Pfizer (453 credits), Thunder (659 credits, up from 432 credits the year before), and the German company, bio.logis (330 credits). A notable end user is Johnson & Johnson, who was just outside of the top 30, with 221 credits, up from 29 credits the year before. Other end users outside of the top 30, include the European Commission (189 credits), Workday (112 credits), Paypal (80 credits), NBCUniversal (48 credits), Wolters Kluwer (20 credits), and Burda Media (24 credits). We also saw contributions from many universities, including the University of British Columbia (148 credits), University of Waterloo (129 credits), Princeton University (73 credits), University of Austin Texas at Austin (57 credits), Charles Darwin University (24 credits), University of Edinburgh (23 credits), University of Minnesota (19 credits) and many more.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if more end users mandated contributions from their partners. Pfizer, for example, only works with agencies that contribute back to Drupal, and uses Drupal's credit system to verify their vendors' claims. The State of Georgia started doing the same; they also made Open Source contribution a vendor selection criteria. If more end users took this stance, it could have a big impact on the number of digital agencies, hosting companies and system integrators that contribute to Drupal.

While we should encourage more organizations to sponsor Drupal contributions, we should also understand and respect that some organizations can give more than others and that some might not be able to give back at all. Our goal is not to foster an environment that demands what and how others should give back. Instead, we need to help foster an environment worthy of contribution. This is clearly laid out in Drupal's Values and Principles.

How diverse is Drupal?

Supporting diversity and inclusion within Drupal is essential to the health and success of the project. The people who work on Drupal should reflect the diversity of people who use and work with the web.

I looked at both the gender and geographic diversity of Drupal.org contributors. While these are only two examples of diversity, these are the only diversity characteristics we currently have sufficient data for. Drupal.org recently rolled out support for Big 8/Big 10, so next year we should have more demographics information

Gender diversity

The data shows that only 8% of the recorded contributions were made by contributors who do not identify as male, which continues to indicate a wide gender gap. This is a one percent increase compared to last year. The gender imbalance in Drupal is profound and underscores the need to continue fostering diversity and inclusion in our community.

Last year I wrote a post called about the privilege of free time in Open Source. It made the case that Open Source is not a meritocracy, because not everyone has equal amounts of free time to contribute. For example, research shows that women still spend more than double the time as men doing unpaid domestic work, such as housework or childcare. This makes it more difficult for women to contribute to Open Source on an unpaid, volunteer basis. It's one of the reasons why Open Source projects suffer from a lack of diversity, among others including hostile environments and unconscious biases. Drupal.org's credit data unfortunately still shows a big gender disparity in contributions:

Ideally, over time, we can collect more data on non-binary gender designations, as well as segment some of the trends behind contributions by gender. We can also do better at collecting data on other systemic issues beyond gender alone. Knowing more about these trends can help us close existing gaps. In the meantime, organizations capable of giving back should consider financially sponsoring individuals from underrepresented groups to contribute to Open Source. Each of us needs to decide if and how we can help give time and opportunities to underrepresented groups and how we can create equity for everyone in Drupal.

Geographic diversity

When measuring geographic diversity, we saw individual contributors from six continents and 114 countries:

Contribution credits per capita calculated as the amount of contributions per continent divided by the population of each continent. 0.001% means that one in 100,000 people contribute to Drupal. In North America, 5 in 100,000 people contributed to Drupal the last year.

Contributions from Europe and North America are both on the rise. In absolute terms, Europe contributes more than North America, but North America contributes more per capita.

Asia, South America and Africa remain big opportunities for Drupal, as their combined population accounts for 6.3 billion out of 7.5 billion people in the world. Unfortunately, the reported contributions from Asia are declining year over year. For example, compared to last year's report, there was a 17% drop in contribution from India. Despite that drop, India remains the second largest contributor behind the United States:

The top 20 countries from which contributions originate. The data is compiled by aggregating the countries of all individual contributors behind each issue. Note that the geographical location of contributors doesn't always correspond with the origin of their sponsorship. Wim Leers, for example, works from Belgium, but his funding comes from Acquia, which has the majority of its customers in North America.

Top contributor details

To create more awareness of which organizations are sponsoring the top individual contributors, I included a more detailed overview of the top 50 contributors and their sponsors. If you are a Drupal developer looking for work, these are some of the companies I'd apply to first. If you are an end user looking for a company to work with, these are some of the companies I'd consider working with first. Not only do they know Drupal well, they also help improve your investment in Drupal.

Rank Username Issues Volunteer Sponsored Not specified Sponsors 1 kiamlaluno 1610 99% 0% 1% 2 jrockowitz 756 98% 99% 0% The Big Blue House (750), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (5), Rosewood Marketing (1) 3 alexpott 642 6% 80% 19% Thunder (336), Acro Media Inc (100), Chapter Three (77) 4 RajabNatshah 616 1% 100% 0% Vardot (730), Webship (2) 5 volkswagenchick 519 2% 99% 0% Hook 42 (341), Kanopi Studios (171) 6 bojanz 504 0% 98% 2% Centarro (492), Ny Media AS (28), Torchbox (5), Liip (2), Adapt (2) 7 alonaoneill 489 9% 99% 0% Hook 42 (484) 8 thalles 488 0% 100% 0% CI&T (488), Janrain (3), Johnson & Johnson (2) 9 Wim Leers 437 8% 97% 0% Acquia (421), Government of Flanders (3) 10 DamienMcKenna 431 0% 97% 3% Mediacurrent (420) 11 Berdir 424 0% 92% 8% MD Systems (390) 12 chipway 356 0% 100% 0% Chipway (356) 13 larowlan 324 16% 94% 2% PreviousNext (304), Charles Darwin University (22), University of Technology, Sydney (3), Service NSW (2), Department of Justice & Regulation, Victoria (1) 14 pifagor 320 52% 100% 0% GOLEMS GABB (618), EPAM Systems (16), Drupal Ukraine Community (6) 15 catch 313 1% 95% 4% Third & Grove (286), Tag1 Consulting (11), Drupal Association (6), Acquia (4) 16 mglaman 277 2% 98% 1% Centarro (271), Oomph, Inc. (16), E.C. Barton & Co (3), Gaggle.net, Inc. (1), Bluespark (1), Thinkbean (1), LivePerson, Inc (1), Impactiv, Inc. (1), Rosewood Marketing (1), Acro Media Inc (1) 17 adci_contributor 274 0% 100% 0% ADCI Solutions (273) 18 quietone 266 41% 75% 1% Acro Media Inc (200) 19 tim.plunkett 265 3% 89% 9% Acquia (235) 20 gaurav.kapoor 253 0% 51% 49% OpenSense Labs (129), DrupalFit (111) 21 RenatoG 246 0% 100% 0% CI&T (246), Johnson & Johnson (85) 22 heddn 243 2% 98% 2% MTech, LLC (202), Tag1 Consulting (32), European Commission (22), North Studio (3), Acro Media Inc (2) 23 chr.fritsch 241 0% 99% 1% Thunder (239) 24 xjm 238 0% 85% 15% Acquia (202) 25 phenaproxima 238 0% 100% 0% Acquia (238) 26 mkalkbrenner 235 0% 100% 0% bio.logis Genetic Information Management GmbH (234), OSCE: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (41), Welsh Government (4) 27 gvso 232 0% 100% 0% Google Summer of Code (214), Google Code-In (16), Zivtech (1) 28 dawehner 219 39% 84% 8% Chapter Three (176), Drupal Association (5), Tag1 Consulting (3), TES Global (1) 29 e0ipso 218 99% 100% 0% Lullabot (217), IBM (23) 30 drumm 205 0% 98% 1% Drupal Association (201) 31 gabesullice 199 0% 100% 0% Acquia (198), Aten Design Group (1) 32 amateescu 194 0% 97% 3% Pfizer, Inc. (186), Drupal Association (1), Chapter Three (1) 33 klausi 193 2% 59% 40% jobiqo - job board technology (113) 34 samuel.mortenson 187 42% 42% 17% Acquia (79) 35 joelpittet 187 28% 78% 14% The University of British Columbia (146) 36 borisson_ 185 83% 50% 3% Calibrate (79), Dazzle (13), Intracto digital agency (1) 37 Gábor Hojtsy 184 0% 97% 3% Acquia (178) 38 adriancid 182 91% 22% 2% Drupiter (40) 39 eiriksm 182 0% 100% 0% Violinist (178), Ny Media AS (4) 40 yas 179 12% 80% 10% DOCOMO Innovations, Inc. (143) 41 TR 177 0% 0% 100% 42 hass 173 1% 0% 99% 43 Joachim Namyslo 172 69% 0% 31% 44 alex_optim 171 0% 99% 1% GOLEMS GABB (338) 45 flocondetoile 168 0% 99% 1% Flocon de toile (167) 46 Lendude 168 52% 99% 0% Dx Experts (91), ezCompany (67), Noctilaris (9) 47 paulvandenburg 167 11% 72% 21% ezCompany (120) 48 voleger 165 98% 98% 2% GOLEMS GABB (286), Lemberg Solutions Limited (36), Drupal Ukraine Community (1) 49 lauriii 164 3% 98% 1% Acquia (153), Druid (8), Lääkärikeskus Aava Oy (2) 50 idebr 162 0% 99% 1% ezCompany (156), One Shoe (5) Limitations of the credit system

It is important to note a few of the current limitations of Drupal.org's credit system:

• The credit system doesn't capture all code contributions. Parts of Drupal are developed on GitHub rather than Drupal.org, and often aren't fully credited on Drupal.org. For example, Drush is maintained on GitHub instead of Drupal.org, and companies like Pantheon don't get credit for that work. The Drupal Association is working to integrate GitLab with Drupal.org. GitLab will provide support for "merge requests", which means contributing to Drupal will feel more familiar to the broader audience of Open Source contributors who learned their skills in the post-patch era. Some of GitLab's tools, such as in-line editing and web-based code review will also lower the barrier to contribution, and should help us grow both the number of contributions and contributors on Drupal.org.
• The credit system is not used by everyone. There are many ways to contribute to Drupal that are still not captured in the credit system, including things like event organizing or providing support. Technically, that work could be captured as demonstrated by the various non-product initiatives highlighted in this post. Because using the credit system is optional, many contributors don't. As a result, contributions often have incomplete or no contribution credits. We need to encourage all Drupal contributors to use the credit system, and raise awareness of its benefits to both individuals and organizations. Where possible, we should automatically capture credits. For example, translation efforts on https://localize.drupal.org are not currently captured in the credit system but could be automatically.
• The credit system disincentives work on complex issues. We currently don't have a way to account for the complexity and quality of contributions; one person might have worked several weeks for just one credit, while another person might receive a credit for 10 minutes of work. We certainly see a few individuals and organizations trying to game the credit system. In the future, we should consider issuing credit data in conjunction with issue priority, patch size, number of reviews, etc. This could help incentivize people to work on larger and more important problems and save smaller issues such as coding standards improvements for new contributor sprints. Implementing a scoring system that ranks the complexity of an issue would also allow us to develop more accurate reports of contributed work.

All of this means that the actual number of contributions and contributors could be significantly higher than what we report.

Like Drupal itself, the Drupal.org credit system needs to continue to evolve. Ultimately, the credit system will only be useful when the community uses it, understands its shortcomings, and suggests constructive improvements.

A first experiment with weighing credits

As a simple experiment, I decided to weigh each credit based on the adoption of the project the credit is attributed to. For example, each contribution credit to Drupal core is given a weight of 11 because Drupal core has about 1,1 million active installations. Credits to the Webform module, which has over 400,000 installations, get a weight of 4. And credits to Drupal's Commerce project gets just 1 point as it is installed on fewer than 100,000 sites.

The idea is that these weights capture the end user impact of each contribution, but also act as a proxy for the effort required to get a change committed. Getting a change accepted in Drupal core is both more difficult and more impactful than getting a change accepted to Commerce project.

This weighting is far from perfect as it undervalues non-product contributions, and it still doesn't recognize all types of product contributions (e.g. product strategy work, product management work, release management work, etc). That said, for code contributions, it may be more accurate than a purely unweighted approach.

The top 30 contributing individuals based on weighted Drupal.org issue credits.

The top 30 contributing organizations based on weighted Drupal.org issue credits.

Conclusions

Our data confirms that Drupal is a vibrant community full of contributors who are constantly evolving and improving the software. It's amazing to see that just in the last year, Drupal welcomed more than 8,000 individuals contributors and over 1,100 corporate contributors. It's especially nice to see the number of reported contributions, individual contributors and organizational contributors increase year over year.

To grow and sustain Drupal, we should support those that contribute to Drupal and find ways to get those that are not contributing involved in our community. Improving diversity within Drupal is critical, and we should welcome any suggestions that encourage participation from a broader range of individuals and organizations.

Portland, OR - The Drupal Association, an international nonprofit organization, welcomes its newly appointed board members to help advance its mission to unite a global open source community to build, secure, and promote Drupal. The Association’s Board of Directors ratified the appointment of five new board members in September, including: Grace Francisco, Lo Li, Owen Lansbury, Ryan Szrama and Leslie Glynn, who was elected for the community-at-large seat.

“We are excited to have these amazing individuals join us in our efforts to broaden our reach into diverse communities and to grow Drupal adoption. They bring a wide range of experiences and expertise to the Association that will enhance our opportunities to reach new audiences, support the Drupal community and elevate the Drupal project around the world,” said Adam Goodman, Drupal Association Board Chair. “We welcome Grace’s significant work in developer relations, developer marketing and program management; Leslie’s experience as a developer and project manager long emphasized by her years of contributions as a Drupal community member; Owen’s creative problem-solving, local Drupal association and DrupalCamp experience and business leadership skills; Lo’s extensive work in content management, brand promotion and tech platforms alongside her advocacy for women in technology; and Ryan’s product and service development and business skills coupled with his strong relationships in the Drupal community. We look forward to working with all of our new board members to achieve the Association’s strategic goals.”

Grace Francisco joined MongoDB in July as Vice President, Worldwide Developer Relations. Prior to that, she served as Vice President of Developer Relations and Education at gaming platform Roblox where she doubled the size of active developers to 2+ million. A seasoned developer relations leader with over 20 years of experience in software, she has co-authored three patents and led worldwide developer initiatives at Microsoft, Intuit, Yodlee and Atlassian. Francisco graduated cum laude and holds a BBA in Business Management from Golden Gate University.

“I am super excited to join the Drupal Association board,” said Francisco. “I first encountered the Drupal project back in 2010 while I was at Microsoft doing outreach to open source projects - building bridges to open source communities. It’s wonderful now, almost a decade later, to help from the other side to build bridges from Drupal to other tech organizations to broaden Drupal’s adoption.”

Leslie Glynn has more than thirty years of experience in the tech field as a software developer and project manager. She has been a freelance Drupal Project Manager and Site Builder since 2012. Glynn is very active in the Drupal community as an event organizer (Design 4 Drupal, Boston and NEDCamp), sprint organizer, mentor, trainer and volunteer. She is the winner of the 2019 Aaron Winborn Award. This annual award recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community.

“Being a volunteer at numerous Drupal camps and DrupalCons has given me the opportunity to meet and learn from many diverse members of the Drupal community,” said Glynn. “I hope to bring that knowledge and experience to my work on Drupal Association initiatives. One of the things I would like to help with is growing Drupal adoption through new initiatives that reach out to underrepresented and diverse groups through an increased presence at secondary schools and universities and to groups, such as Girls Who Code, in the tech space.”

Owen Lansbury is co-founder of PreviousNext, an independent Australian digital design and development company that has been one of the world's most prolific code contributors to the Drupal project. With 25 years’ professional experience and a background in Fine Art, Digital Media and User Experience Design, Lansbury blends creative problem solving with the business skills required to sustain his own company and work successfully with complex customers. He is also an active leader within the Australian and New Zealand Drupal community, bringing DrupalCon to Sydney in 2013, acting as Track Chair at several regional events and chairing the DrupalSouth Steering Committee.

Lansbury said, “As a long-term Drupal community contributor in Australia and New Zealand, I'm excited about the opportunity to bring my grassroots experience to the Association board at a global level. I've always been a bit jealous of our developers contributing code to Drupal, so being able to contribute my own business and community leadership experience to the Association board is a great opportunity for me to give something back at a global level."

Lo Li is the Senior Vice President, CIO of Global Consumer Solutions at Equifax. She has spent the past two decades leading global multi-billion dollar corporations for some of the world’s most renowned hospitality and retail brands in the world, working with hundreds of teams dispersed in the UK, China, Singapore and India. Some of her work includes the creation for dynamic pricing and predictive analytics engines for global hotels; and scaling big data and Agile to enable business transformation at large retailers including double digit growth plans for digital and international presence. She brings a deep understanding of how to translate corporate visions and strategies into simple, elegant solutions - using her international business acumen and technology background as both a business enabler and a competitive differentiator. Li, who is multilingual - fluent in Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish and English - is the recipient of several industry accolades and serves on the Board of Directors for several national nonprofit organizations. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Georgia.

Li said, “I am thrilled to join the Drupal Association board because of the incredible open source community that has been fostered. The nurturing and growth of communities, like the one we have at Drupal, are the very catalyst to help organizations leap forward and provide an incubator for new ideas and thought leadership amongst digital citizens. It's truly an honor to be able to help shape the future of such a great organization!”

Ryan Szrama co-founded Commerce Guys in 2009 to offer Drupal-based eCommerce consulting and development services. He was the project lead of Drupal’s most popular eCommerce framework, Drupal Commerce, from its creation to its eventual use on over 60,000 websites. In 2016, Ryan acquired control of Commerce Guys from his partners, leading the company to rebrand to Centarro and launch new product and support offerings that enable teams to build with confidence on Drupal Commerce.

"My personal goals align perfectly with the mission of the Drupal Association: uniting a global open source community to build Drupal,” said Szrama. “I've been privileged to build a career in this community as a long-time contributor turned business owner, and I'm continually inspired by the members of this board to think bigger and give back more. I hope to apply my knowledge and experience to board initiatives that empower more people to better themselves and their organizations by using and contributing to Drupal."

The newly-elected members will join the following Association board members, continuing their service in the upcoming term: 

• Baddý Sonja Breidert, 1xINTERNET

• Dries Buytaert, Acquia

• Luma Dahlbacka, Charles Schwab & Co

• Suzanne Dergacheva, Evolving Web

• Adam Goodman, Northwestern University’s Center for Leadership

• Mike Lamb, Pfizer

• Audra Martin-Merrick, Red Backpack Limited

• George Matthes, Johnson & Johnson

• Vishal Mehrotra, Tata Consultancy Services

• Ingo Rübet, BOTLabs GmbH

• Michel van Velde, One Shoe

About Drupal

Drupal is one of the leading content management software platforms that has been used to create millions of websites around the world. There are 46,000 plus developers with 1.3 million users on Drupal.org, and Drupal has the largest open source community in the world. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance and excellent security. What sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need.

About Drupal Association

The Drupal Association is an international non-profit organization that engages a broad audience about Drupal, the leading CMS open source project. The Association promotes  Drupal adoption through the work and initiatives of a worldwide community of dedicated contributors, and support from individual and organizational members. The Drupal Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration. For more information, visit Drupal.org.

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This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Dries Buytaert's blog.

I'm excited to share that when Drupal 8.8 drops in December, Drupal's WYSIWYG editor will allow media embedding.

You may wonder: Why is that worth announcing on your blog? It's just one new button in my WYSIWYG editor.

It's a big deal because Drupal's media management has been going through a decade-long transformation. The addition of WYSIWYG integration completes the final milestone. You can read more about it on Wim's blog post.

Drupal 8.8 should ship with complete media management, which is fantastic news for site builders and content authors who have long wanted a simpler way to embed media in Drupal.

Congratulations to the Media Initiative team for this significant achievement!

The Drupal Association (DA) is pleased to announce the recent hire of Carole Bernard as the Director of Marketing and Outreach. She and her team will focus on increasing visibility for the Drupal Association and opportunities for Drupal adoption through marketing, community engagement, volunteer management and public relations activities.

With extensive nonprofit and public sector experience, Bernard has served in senior leadership roles for more than 15 years at local, regional and national organizations.  

Bernard, a Boston native, began her career as a speechwriter for the Mayor of Boston. She then worked as the Director of Public Information for the largest human service agency in New England, Action for Boston Community Development, Inc. She started her own consulting business in 2015, providing strategic communications, fundraising and executive management services to nonprofit organizations in the Washington, DC area. She recently served as the Director of Communications and Marketing for Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, Inc. She also has worked for Paralyzed Veterans of America, National Center for Women and Children and the National Minority AIDS Council as their Director of Communication.

“I am so excited to be a part of the dynamic team at the Drupal Association,” says Bernard. “I am blown away by the passion and commitment of the Drupal community, and I look forward to working with everyone to tell the DA story, to showcase the Drupal project, to broaden the organization’s reach to new audiences and to increase opportunities for Drupal adoption around the world through strategic communications and outreach efforts.”

“We want to continue to position Drupal as the leading open-source CMS for ambitious digital experiences that reach audiences across multiple channels around the world,” says Heather Rocker, DA Executive Director. “We also want to expand our efforts to bring new entities and individuals to the table to participate in our global community. We are excited to have Carole join us and to help us lay out and execute a plan that leverages all of the DA assets for growth, inclusion, awareness and participation.”

Bernard received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Framingham State College and her master’s degree in Journalism from Boston University.

What’s new in Drupal 8.7.0?

This release introduces powerful features that will help us all take Drupal to a whole new level. The new stable JSON:API core module as well as the intuitive and accessible stable Layout Builder are game-changing.

Download Drupal 8.7.0

Layout Builder is stable

The Layout Builder module was originally introduced as an experimental module in Drupal 8.5.0. As of Drupal 8.7.0, Layout Builder is now stable and ready for production use! It provides a powerful, accessible, mobile-friendly page building tool that is fully compatible with revisions, workflows, and in-context previews.

The Layout Builder enables site builders to rapidly create layout templates for content that speed up the development process. It also permits content authors to easily customize individual pages with unique layouts.

The interface allows drag-and-drop management of your content blocks. It additionally supports keyboard controls and toggling the content preview on and off to give the content editor complete control of their experience while building their layouts.

The result of all these features is a state-of-the art content management solution that streamlines mass-production while also supporting unique creation. 123 individuals and 68 organizations contributed to this feature. More than 40 of the individual contributors volunteered some or all of their time.

Check out this demonstration based on the core Umami demo:

The team is working on implementing translation support for layouts in a future release.

New stable JSON:API support

JSON:API support is now included as a stable core feature. The JSON:API specification is an easy and fast way to build decoupled applications. Drupal core's JSON:API module is feature-complete and easy to use with robust out-of-the-box support and simple setup. JSON:API makes it simpler than ever to build ambitious projects. 147 contributors and 76 organizations contributed to this new feature. Among the individual contributors, more than 50 volunteered some or all of their time.

For example, by simply navigating to a URL like https://example.com/jsonapi/node/article, you can get a list of available articles on your site, and filter further from there, to display your Drupal content in decoupled websites, mobile applications, and so on.

Improvements in experimental Media Library

The experimental Media Library has numerous significant improvements in this release. The Media Library is built on top of the stable Media module, which allows reuse of images, documents, and even embedded remote media like YouTube videos. Items in the Media Library can be managed with drag-and-drop. This release improves the design and accessibility of the user interface, allows inline media creation in the library, and provides more flexible grid and table views. 310 contributors and 122 organizations contributed to this new feature. More than 100 individuals volunteered some or all of their time!

Check out this demonstration based the core Umami demo with Media Library enabled:

There are various tasks left to make Media Library stable in a future release, including WYSIWYG integration.

Revisionable menus and taxonomy terms

Custom menu links and taxonomy terms are now revisionable, which allows them to be used in editorial workflows (similarly to nodes, media, and custom blocks). The Entity system now also provides a new Update API to support conversion of further entity types. It supports converting the schema of any content entity type between non-revisionable or non-translatable and revisionable or translatable, which also works when there is pre-existing data for the entity type whose schema is being changed. All these changes improve core support for the Workspaces module.

New features in the Umami demo profile

The Umami food magazine demo is now more accessible and demonstrates more features out of the box, including a new welcome tour, Layout Builder integration for recipes, and multilingual features. The profile now includes a curated set of Spanish translations, and more languages are in the works. 187 contributors and 84 organizations have contributed to Umami, with more than 60 individuals volunteering some or all of their time.

Umami empowers first-time users to spin up a Drupal project in no time so that they can use to evaluate Drupal and learn about its major components.

On the way to Drupal 9

Drupal 8.7.0 includes optional support for Twig 2 (for sites that can patch their Composer configuration). Optional support for Symfony 4 also received a lot of contributions and should be complete in 8.8. This is important work, because Drupal 9 is planned for June 3, 2020 and will update various dependencies, primarily Symfony. Testing Drupal with updated third-party dependencies will help us get better feedback on our compatibility with these dependencies and any difficulties sites encounter when upgrading.

What does this mean for me? Drupal 8 site owners

Update to 8.7.0 to continue receiving bug fixes. The next bugfix release (8.7.1) is scheduled for June 5, 2019. (See the release schedule overview for more information.) As of this release, sites on Drupal 8.5 will no longer receive security coverage. (Drupal 8.6 will continue receiving security fixes until December 4, 2019.)

Note that new Drupal 8.7.0 installs now require at least PHP 7.0.8. Existing sites still work on at least PHP 5.5.9 for now, but will display a warning. Drupal security updates will begin requiring PHP 7 as early as Drupal 8.8.0 (December 2019), so all users are advised to update to at least PHP 7.0.8 now.

Updating your site from 8.6.15 to 8.7.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.6.14 to 8.6.15. Drupal 8.7.0 also has updates to several dependencies. Modules, themes, and translations may need updates for these and other changes in this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site. Read the 8.7.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your site.

Drupal 6 and 7 site owners

Drupal 7 is fully supported by the community until November 2021, and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout this time. From November 2021 until at least November 2024, the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support program will be offered by vendors.

Drupal 6 is no longer supported.

You can now use the stable migration path for monolingual Drupal 6 and 7 sites with the built-in upgrade user interface. For multilingual sites, there is experimental support; please keep testing and reporting any issues you may find.

Translation, module, and theme contributors

Minor releases like Drupal 8.7.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features.

Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 8.6.x and earlier will be compatible with 8.7.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. Read the 8.7.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your modules and themes.

This release has advanced the Drupal project significantly and represents the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and contributors from various organizations, as well as testers from the Minor release beta testing program. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 8.7!

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://www.srijan.net/case-studies

* The given URL is gated, as per the client's request.

The client is a global leader in prestige beauty — delighting its consumers with its transformative products and experiences, inspiring them to express their individual beauty. It takes pride in focussing solely on prestige makeup and beauty care with a diverse portfolio of 25+ brands distributed globally through eCommerce channels and retail outlets sold in 150 countries.

They aim to transform the beauty industry landscape with their customer service by providing modern training and understanding of the products with (digital solutions) to its teams.

Srijan worked closely to design an open-source, multilingual, decoupled learning platform where beauty advisors could consume a vast set of learning resources.

Here’s how we helped them reduce 30% cost in classroom training while also able to track ROI from the learning and training initiatives.

Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://linktr.ee/srijan

20+Brands rolled out within a year                   1 mn+Stories migrated                  50% Drop in development cost

Crain Communications is one of the largest privately-owned media companies with more than 50 leading business, trade and consumer brands in North America, Europe and Asia. It boasts of delivering news to more than 6 million global business leaders.

Managing a number of websites proved to be a challenge because each brand was operating on its own web platform. The new digital initiative was to ensure brand consistency and operational efficiency.

Providing a central governance model would help efficiently manage the different web properties while also lowering down the cost.

Srijan rolled out 20+ websites onto the new platform from the various framework without compromising best practices across SEO, performance, and media management.

The central digital publishing platform was built on Drupal 8, reducing the development time by half compared to an earlier estimate (if websites were done independently).

What Crain Wanted To Achieve

When Crain approached us, they had the sole objective of eliminating their digital sprawl and creating a unified, scalable and highly configurable digital platform. They wanted this platform to enable business teams to effectively narrate the distinct brand stories and offer a rich customer experience. And despite all the sophistication, they wanted the backend simplified enough so content editors can take control of the websites, reducing dependencies on their IT teams.

What We Delivered

We built a unified, scalable Drupal 8 platform that drives Crain digital presence. We rolled out 20+ websites onto the new platform, 4 of them within 6 weeks. We migrated 1 million+ stories dating from 1995 without compromising on best practices across SEO, performance, and media management. 

With a central publishing platform on Drupal 8, we reduced the development time by 50% compared to an earlier estimate (if websites were done independently) and at a much lower cost.