Chapter 14: Final Thoughts
Connecting with the Community
Prerequisite knowledge
How can you connect with the community?
The Drupal project has a world-wide community of developers and users. One of the best ways to improve your knowledge of the platform is to connect with others that are using it, and get involved in the open-source community. There are many ways that you can get started:
- Attend an event: There are both regional and international Drupal events held around the world. See the "DrupalCon" page on Drupal.org to find international events, and the "Event Calendar" on groups.drupal.org or drupical.com to find regional events.
- Join a local group: There are Drupal user groups all around the world. Many of them have regular meetings, which you can attend to learn more about Drupal and connect to other Drupal users. Find local user groups on groups.drupal.org.
- Participate in a topical or language group: There are also interest groups for a wide range of topics, which have on-line discussion forums. Find topical groups on groups.drupal.org. Many languages have their own websites too; you can find them on the "Language-specific communities" page on Drupal.org.
- Chat online: The Drupal project uses Slack and DrupalChat for on-line chatting. There are regional, topical, and general-purpose chat groups available. Find out more on the "Slack" page on Drupal.org and "DrupalChat" page on Drupal.org.
- Report a problem: See below.
- Contribute: You can contribute your time and expertise to the community in many ways, such as: * Developing modules or themes. See the "Contribute to Development" page on Drupal.org, or improving them (using the issue queues for existing projects). * Translating the user interface. See localize.drupal.org. * Writing documentation. See "Contribute to Documentation" on Drupal.org. * Answer Support questions. See Getting Support.
How can you report a problem or suggest a feature?
Each project within the community (such as the Drupal Core project for the base software, and projects for each contributed theme and module) uses issues to keep track of software bugs and plans for new features. You can participate by creating a bug report when you find a problem, creating a feature request, or commenting on existing issues. Search before creating an issue, to make sure that the problem or feature has not already been reported or requested. See the Drupal.org page "Use the issue queue" and the Drupal.org page "Reporting a problem" for more information.
If you find a problem that you believe is related to security, such as a cross-site scripting vulnerability, do not report it in the standard issue queue. Instead, report it to the security team. See the Drupal.org page "How to report a security issue" for details.
Related topics
Additional resources
- "Code of Conduct" on Drupal.org
- "Event Calendar" on groups.drupal.org or drupical.com
- "Community page on Drupal.org
- groups.drupal.org
- "Slack" page on Drupal.org
- "DrupalChat" page on Drupal.org
- "Ways to get involved" page on Drupal.org
- Drupal.org page "Why get involved?"
- Drupal.org page "Contributor tasks"
- Drupal.org page "Use the issue queue"
- Drupal.org page "Reporting a problem"
- Drupal.org page "How to report a security issue"
Getting Support
Prerequisite knowledge
Where can you find support?
The Drupal project is open-source, so if you have questions about or problems with the software, your options for finding answers and fixes are somewhat different from what they would be for commercial software.
There are several options for free support provided by community volunteers. First, some Slack channels, DrupalChat channels, local groups, and language communities encourage support questions, through on-line chat, in-person meetings, or websites (find out more about these on Connecting with the Community).
Second, some (but not all) contributed module, distribution, and theme projects encourage you to post support requests in issues. Generally, projects that have a very large number of users do not allow support requests in their issues (Drupal Core is in that category), while projects with a smaller number of users welcome the occasional support question. Be respectful of developer time and read the documentation for the project before posting a question in an issue. On the other hand, all projects encourage you to use issues to report problems and bugs; see Connecting with the Community to learn more about that.
In addition to those resources, the following sites provide free forums where volunteers answer support questions about Drupal:
If you prefer to pay for support (presumably in exchange for more extensive service or better availability), you can find service providers in the "Drupal Marketplace" on Drupal.org.
Related topics
Additional resources
- "Support" page on Drupal.org
- "Drupal Marketplace" on Drupal.org
- The Drupal.org Forums
- "Drupal Answers" on StackExchange
Learning More
Prerequisite knowledge
Where can you go to learn more?
The following resources should prove useful to you, as you continue to advance your skills:
- Drupal Community Documentation: Wiki-like documentation contributed by the Drupal community, ranging from basic to advanced, about all aspects of Drupal (site building and administration, theming, development, and contributed modules).
- api.drupal.org: Reference documentation for programmers about the Drupal API.
- "Drupal Planet" page on Drupal.org: An aggregation of blog posts about Drupal from around the web, posted by blogging members of the Drupal community who have applied for inclusion. Topics range from programming to site building to Drupal news.
- Groups, events, and meetups: See Connecting with the Community for more about topical, regional, and language groups, as well as local, regional, and international events.
- "Training Marketplace" page on Drupal.org: The Marketplace lists paid training providers. For free training, check whether events include training sessions; there are also free or very low-cost training events listed on the "Global Training Days" page on Drupal.org.
- Support sites: See Getting Support to locate support forums; searching them can be useful for learning about specific topics.