Contribute Your Code on Drupal.org, Part 1: Getting Started
Welcome to the first part of our new series about contributing to Drupal for beginners. Here are all the parts of the series:
{snippet drupalcontributionlinks}
We recently published our first theme to Drupal.org. That theme is called Breeze.
However, you don’t have to be a designer or developer to contribute to Drupal. Here is a list of the many different ways you can contribute to Drupal:
- User Support
- Documentation
- Translation
- Testing
- Design and Usability
- Donations
- Development
- Themes
- Marketing.
We can’t hope to cover all aspects of contributing at this time, so in this series, we will focus on the development aspect of contributing a Drupal theme. In general, the best way to give back is simply to share your knowledge of what you have learned and help others who are trying to achieve similar goals to your own. Network with like-minded Drupalers and you will benefit from the experience and knowledge they possess.
Creating an account on Drupal.org
Very little happens in the Drupal community that doesn’t touch Drupal.org in some way. So let’s get started by signing up at Drupal.org.
First, we need to open an account on Drupal.org, familiarize yourself with the tools you will need to make a module, and apply to have it hosted as a project on drupal.org.
- Click “Create account”:
- Fill in the required details:
Now that we have opened an account, there are more profile details to complete.
- Go to the “My Account” link in the top-right corner.
- Click the “Profile” tab, then “View”, then click “Edit”.
- Now you can expand your profile. It’s important to Drupal that you provide information about yourself to verify your intent. If possible make sure to fill in the tabbed sections also:
- Personal information
- Drupal
- Work
Getting Ready: Git, SSH Keys and a Code Editor
Before contributing code to Drupal.org, I would recommend that you familiarize yourself with Git and SSH keys.
Drupal uses its own Git system to manage the Drupal projects. So we will need to setup SSH Key and configure a Git client for use with Drupal.org.
I recommend our Git class if you are new to using Git, and we have a class on SSH Keys also.
We will also need a code editor – I recommend Atom. It is 100% free and comes with some useful tools that we can use to save time when working with our module. Atom is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
In Part 2 we will look at starting our project. We will be setting up our Git access to Drupal.org so we can start to use the Drupal Git system.