Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

Our December update comes to you a bit later than our usual monthly posts, for all the usual practical reasons: holidays, vacations, and our staff retreat in early January. But also, because we've been reflecting on the past year, and planning for the year to come. You'll soon hear about our initiatives for 2017, but for now— let's dive into what we did in December.

Drupal.org updates

DrupalCon Baltimore

At the beginning of December we launched the full site for DrupalCon Baltimore, which is coming up April 24-28. For the first time, we launched the full event site including the call for papers, scholarship applications, and registration all on the same day.

Early bird pricing is available for a limited time, so we encourage you to register today.

Stable release of the Composer Façade

Drupal.org's support for Composer has been in development since the beginning of last year. We released the public alpha of our composer endpoints at DrupalCon New Orleans, and then entered beta over the course of this past summer. After a period of feedback, bug fixes, and further refinement with the help of core and contrib developers we announced the stable release of Drupal.org's composer support on December 21st.

The Drupal Community Working Group is pleased to announce that nominations for the 2017 Aaron Winborn Award are now open. This annual award recognizes an individual who demonstrates personal integrity, kindness, and above-and-beyond commitment to the Drupal community. It will include a scholarship and stipend to attend DrupalCon and recognition in a plenary session at the event.

Nominations are open to not only well-known Drupal contributors, but also people who have made a big impact in their local or regional community. If you know of someone who has made a big difference to any number of people in our community, we want to hear about it.

This award was created in honor of long-time Drupal contributor Aaron Winborn, whose battle with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) (also referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease) came to an end on March 24, 2015. Based on a suggestion by Hans Riemenschneider, the Community Working Group, with the support of the Drupal Association, launched the Aaron Winborn Award.

Nominations are open until March 1, 2017. A committee consisting of the Community Working Group members and past award winners will select a winner from the submissions. Members of this committee and previous winners are exempt from winning the award.

Previous winners of the award are:

Like last year around this date, it is the time of year where we predict what the future wil bring for Drupal. Will decoupled Drupal get a head start? Wil chatbots be written in Drupal, will our tool fuel the Internet of Things, will the Whitehouse still run Drupal and will there be an IPO of a Drupal company?

Time to put your predictions, deep thoughts and even deeper thoughts online, and post them as a comment here. And in case you lack inspiration, see the previous predictions for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Within weeks of introducing the contribution credit system on Drupal.org we realized we had created something powerful. Like all open source projects, Drupal has a behind-the-scenes economy of contribution in which individuals, organizations, and end users work together to maintain the software as a public good. That behind-the-scenes economy was brought to the fore when we chose to rank the Drupal Marketplace by issue credits. For the first time, Drupal.org gave businesses a direct financial incentive to contribute code.  

Being good stewards of these incentives is a sobering responsibility, but also a great opportunity. We can use this system to recognize the selfless effort of our community volunteers, to reward the organizations that sponsor their employees' time to give back to the project, and to connect end-users with the organizations that are the biggest contributors.

But as we often say in this community—contribution is more than code. It is the time provided by dedicated volunteers; the talent of community organizers, documentation maintainers, and developers; and the treasure provided by organizations that sponsor Drupal events and fund the operations and infrastructure that maintain the project.

What are we changing?

We’re updating the ranking algorithm for Drupal.org’s Marketplace of service providers and list of all organizations in the Drupal ecosystem. We've expanded on the issue credit system to create a more generic contribution credit system which lets us recognize more types of contribution. Each type of contribution is now weighted to give the organization an overall amount of contribution credit. We've built this system so that we can continuously evolve the incentives it creates by adjusting the weight given to each type of contribution as the project's needs change. To prevent gaming, we will not be publishing the exact weights or total contribution score, but those weights have been reviewed by the Association Board and Community Working Group.

We've carefully chosen a few new types of contribution to factor into the ranking. These were selected because they create incentives to reach specific goals: encouraging organizations to sponsor development of Drupal, gathering more Drupal 8 success stories that can be used to promote Drupal adoption, and recognizing the financial contributions that promote the fiscal health of the Drupal association.

Republished from buytaert.net

Nine months ago I wrote about the importance of improving Drupal's content workflow capabilities and how we set out to include a common base layer of workflow-related functionality in Drupal 8 core. That base layer would act as the foundation on which we can build a list of great features like cross-site content staging, content branching, site previews, offline browsing and publishing, content recovery and audit logs. Some of these features are really impactful; 5 out of the top 10 most requested features for content authors are related to workflows (features 3-7 on the image below). We will deliver feature requests 3 and 4 as part of the "content workflow initiative" for Drupal 8. Feature requests 5, 6 and 7 are not in scope of the current content workflow initiative but still stand to benefit significantly from it. Today, I'd like to provide an update on the workflow initiative's progress the past 9 months.

The top 10 requested features for content creators according to the 2016 State of Drupal survey. Features 1 and 2 are part of the media initiative for Drupal 8. Features 3 and 4 are part of the content workflow initiative. Features 5, 6 and 7 benefit from the content workflow initiative.

Configurable content workflow states in Drupal 8.2

While Drupal 8.0 and 8.1 shipped with just two workflow states (Published and Unpublished), Drupal 8.2 (with the the experimental Content moderation module) ships with three: Published, Draft, and Archived. Rather than a single 'Unpublished' workflow state, content creators will be able to distinguish between posts to be published later (drafts) and posts that were published before (archived posts).

The 'Draft' workflow state is a long-requested usability improvement, but may seem like a small change. What is more exciting is that the list of workflow states is fully configurable: you can add additional workflow states, or replace them with completely different ones. The three workflow states in Drupal 8.2 are just what we decided to be good defaults.

Drupal.org's Composer endpoints have been available in beta for some time now, and in that time we've begun to see many, many people use Composer to manage Drupal modules and themes. We first launched these repositories before DrupalCon New Orleans as an alpha release, and move into beta a few months later. After receiving your feedback and bug reports we've made updates, and are ready to call this service stable.

What is Composer?

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

… Composer is strongly inspired by node's npm and ruby's bundler." - Source

In a nutshell, Composer allows you to declare the dependencies of your project in a composer.json file in the root of your PHP project. Those dependencies, which you then install through Composer, can have their own composer.json files and their own dependencies—all of which will be automatically managed and installed by Composer. When you need specific control over the versions of dependencies, you can use a composer.lock file.

You can read more about Composer at GetComposer.org.