By vincentc on

Please don’t yell at me. :-)

I’ve read the docs (Helping with development; Developing for Drupal...) and sepeck’s excellent post, but I still don’t know where to go from here.

After installing, using, and developing Drupal for my own websites for 8 months, I feel that I know enough to contribute back to the community. At least I hope so. :)

I would very much like to help in the conversion of 4.7 modules to Drupal 5.0, but how shall I proceed? Is there a list of 4.7 modules that have been abandoned, or that require too much work for just one person?

For now, I’ve applied for a CVS account. I'm still not sure if this is the way to go as you need to specify what type of project you intend to work on. But I don't know that yet, it depends on what's most urgent, what needs to be done...

Vincent

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

webchick’s picture

webchick
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Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented

That's great that you want to help contribute! :D

There are two primary resources I'd take a look at. I'm assuming here from your post that you know your way around programming 4.7 modules and just need some pointers on a) how to port to 5.0 and b) where you should start. Let me know if that's not the case and I can also point you to resources on hooks, how the Form API works, etc.

We have an Updating your modules section in the handbook which contains instructions on how to update between major (and sometimes minor, if there are API changes for security reasons) versions of Drupal. The section you'd be most interested in is: Converting 4.7.x modules to 5.x. This has a list of all the changes between the two versions, and examples of old vs. new code.

Then as far as "where to start," Michelle's done a fantastic job of cataloguing the state of contrib modules versus 5.x status. There are A LOT of modules on this list which are listed as not being started by their maintainers until "after RC" which probably won't be for a few weeks, at least.

Another place to start is, what modules have you found helpful in the past when building Drupal sites? Chances are they're also helpful to someone else. If they're not ported to 5.0 yet, why not start there?

Tell-tale signs that a module hasn't yet been ported are that it's missing a module.info file. Without this, it won't even show up in the module listing.

Before starting, make sure you check the issue queue for whichever module you're porting to make sure that no one else has started porting it already. If they haven't, go ahead and make a new issue called "convert module to 5.0" or something and declare your intent to work on it, so other people don't end up duplicating effort. If there's already a post like that in the queue, check out the patch and see if the author needs any help. Even testing existing 5.0 conversion patches can be extremely helpful -- project maintainers are a lot more likely to look into a patch if it's been looked at thorougly by at least a couple people.

Anyway, hopefully that gets you started on your way. :) Welcome to the (developer) community! :)

vincentc’s picture

vincentc commented

Webchick, thanks for the nice and very informative message. This is exactly what I was looking for!!

Nothing's holding me back from getting started right now!! Hm well... getting carried away here... Sunday evening, almost midnight, let's say tomorrow first thing in the morning. :)

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

In case you or anybody else wants to help authors of contrib themes and modules, here is a list of the most often (more than 1000 times) downloaded themes modules during September. Some of them already may be converted.

Please create patches and attach those patches to the issue tracker for the respective theme or module.

Some links might not work, please leave a comment.

  1. image Downloaded 4603 times
  2. tinymce Downloaded 4432 times
  3. views Downloaded 3334 times
  4. cck Downloaded 2704 times
  5. event Downloaded 2637 times
  6. multiflex Downloaded 2494 times
  7. ecommerce Downloaded 2368 times
  8. Andreas01 Downloaded 2352 times
  9. acidfree Downloaded 2279 times
  10. Amare Downloaded 1928 times
  11. gallery Downloaded 1902 times
  12. pathauto Downloaded 1818 times
  13. arcmateria Downloaded 1711 times
  14. friendselectric Downloaded 1610 times
  15. front Downloaded 1571 times
  16. gsitemap Downloaded 1553 times
  17. aquasoft Downloaded 1552 times
  18. meta Downloaded 1549 times
  19. Andreas09 Downloaded 1546 times
  20. SEOposition Downloaded 1529 times
  21. Nice menus Downloaded 1517 times
  22. fancy Downloaded 1508 times
  23. video Downloaded 1455 times
  24. newsportal Downloaded 1438 times
  25. adsense Downloaded 1435 times
  26. spreadfirefox Downloaded 1433 times
  27. burnt Downloaded 1408 times
  28. Antique modern Downloaded 1404 times
  29. flexinode Downloaded 1397 times
  30. category Downloaded 1395 times
  31. panels Downloaded 1384 times
  32. audio Downloaded 1372 times
  33. Voodoo dolly Downloaded 1356 times
  34. Img assist Downloaded 1336 times
  35. Andreas 03 Downloaded 1335 times
  36. Deliciously blue Downloaded 1325 times
  37. og Downloaded 1259 times
  38. Google analytics Downloaded 1241 times
  39. imce Downloaded 1221 times
  40. Taxonomy access Downloaded 1220 times
  41. chatbox Downloaded 1205 times
  42. webform Downloaded 1202 times
  43. theme editor Downloaded 1169 times
  44. print Downloaded 1168 times
  45. flatforum Downloaded 1162 times
  46. fern Downloaded 1154 times
  47. niftyCorners Downloaded 1142 times
  48. Box Grey Downloaded 1110 times
  49. Internet Services Downloaded 1106 times
  50. B7 Downloaded 1073 times
  51. I18N Downloaded 1064 times
  52. logintoboggan Downloaded 1062 times
  53. feedback Downloaded 1059 times
  54. controlpanel Downloaded 1058 times
  55. gmap Downloaded 1044 times
  56. emailpage Downloaded 1034 times
  57. kubrick Downloaded 1030 times
  58. advuser Downloaded 1016 times

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vincentc’s picture

vincentc commented

OK, so I've decided to start helping with the Event and/or Image modules (because I use them quite frequently and I'm already familiar with them). But I'm still confused what to do next...

Initially, I thought I'd help with the conversion to Drupal 5.0 but it seems there's still a lot of bug fixing and patch reviewing to do for 4.7. So what do you think is the priority: fixing 4.7 bugs or releasing 5.0?

Assuming I work on 4.7 bug fixing, I don't know where to turn to: "pending bug reports"? "pending feature requests"? "pending patches"? "available tasks"? all of the above?... Can I just select any of these and start coding/testing? Am I expected to ask/warn the module maintainer first?

A few examples from the Event Issue Tracker:

I'm aware my questions are all newbie questions, but contributing may seem a bit overwhelming at first. Especially figuring out who can do what and how it's all organised.

Maybe I should just get to work and learn from mistake. People will let me know if I do something wrong, won't they? :)

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

Module developers are autonomous in the way that they handle collaboration with contributors. So I can only tell you how I handle this for example for event.module.

Every contributor is welcome to work on any issue reported against the event module, even if there is already somebody working on it. They might have a better solution after all.

You are also free to change the status if you feel this is appropriate. If you are wrong, somebody else will hopefully notice this. ;)
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