BlogHer 2008: How We Communicate: Open Source Participation: How to advance to the next level

The second session I’m live blogging at BlogHer 2008 in San Francisco is about open source participation on Drupal and WordPress. Here’s the description.

Hopefully our panel on why you should get involved with open source will leave you convinced you want to get started…like yesterday. If so, this panel will take it to the next step: We’ll take a look at some very popular open source blogging platforms and show you how to start contributing to the projects…and how to get more involved as you go along. Angie Byron will be on hand to cover Drupal. And Automattic’s “Happiness Engineer”, Marianne Masculino, will cover WordPress.

Here goes.

Marianne: Marianne asked how many people use WordPress and discussed its basics. It’s build on PHP and MySQL. It’s free to use, and is used by people around the world. It’s customizable and can host your info.

The newest version, 2.6, had 182,256 downloads in the last 24 hrs.

Angie: Drupal is a content management system that is used going “beyond the blog” to include community features (like restaurant review components). It offers full intergration for wikis, blogs, forums, image galleries and event calendars. It’s powerful. It eliminates the webmaster in that you can build custom content types, content listings, etc. It’s a content management framework.

The CM part is proof of concept of what CMF can do. It has a versatile “hook” system that lets modules customize Drupal’s behavior. It can change the way forms behave, modify other modules…without hacking!

Drupal helps you not have to edit PHP files. Angie says they need more themes on the site.

Drupal’s community doubles in size with each release. It has over 300 user groups worldwide. There are thousands of developers, editors, designers, etc developing the platform daily (but only 7% female).

Marianne: WordPress was developed in 2001, which was downloaded 900,000 times. The first WordCamp was held in 2006 in San Francisco. They’ve since been held all around the world. The next one will be in San Francisco August 16.

Angie: Drupal started as a way for university friends could talk to each other. It grew into an online community of people interested in web technologies. It became an open source project which became Drupal in 2001.

Marianne: FOX News, I Can Has Cheez Burger, ArticleTree and many others use WordPress.

Angie: A lot of community sites like Greenopolis and SpreadFirefox use Drupal. Television companies like MyLifetime, MTVUK and Nickelodeon use it. Also Amnesty International and Avril Lavigne use Drupal.

Marianne: WordPress has over 90 contributors to version 2.5 core. There are hundreds who contribute to documentation, translation, bug reports, etc.

Angie: For each release of Drupal, one person is in charge of the release. There are over 2000 contributors on Drupal “Contrib.”

Both Drupal and WordPress use mailing lists and IRC to communicate with people to get the word out about new releases.

Marianne: WordPress looks for people to help in the development planning process.

Angie: The next step in the process is to track issues.

Marianne: On WordPress you can report bugs directly to us.

Angie: Drupal also has an issue tracker that it uses for everything.

People can get involved through:

• Donations for WordPress
• Donations for Drupal
• Evangelism
  • Tell others about WordPress, attend conferences or WordCamps
  • Blog about Drupal and get on the Drupal Planet
  • Join community marketing efforts for Drupal
• Support
  • WordPress has forum support to help with troubleshooting, plugins and questions
  • Support on Drupal helps with the learning curve and helps you meet friends and clients.
• Documentation
  • You can create an account with WordPress to get involved with documentation. Includes administrative, content management, and discussion. Be nice and patient if you do it.
  • For Drupal, documentation is a great way to get involved. Click the documentation link on the site and browse through the handbook. When you find something you think should be improved, add a child page or add comments if you think it needs corrections.
• Bug Reports
  • Once you find a bug on WordPress you can log it and it will be fixed. Before you report a bug, search to make sure it hasn’t already been fixed or reported.
  • Search on Drupal to make sure the bug doesn’t already exist. If it doesn’t, click Create. Know exactly what is wrong before reporting.
• Translations
  • You can translate WordPress into your language. Use formal language throughout (or informal).
  • Drupal lets you edit a file for translation and is working on a web-based translator.
• Testing
  • WordPress offers release candidates available for download before release to find bugs.
  • Drupal offers usability testing that anyone can help with. The more input they get the more useful the site becomes. Drupal also uses patch reviews until a solution is found. The site also runs and writes automated tests
• Development
  • People can contribute in development planning for WordPress through formalizing proposals, consolidating email threads, or collaborating on feature specifics.
  • On Drupal you can contribute patches (if you’re technical!) or you can start a project of your own. Make sure no one has done it yet. Get a CVS account and get started.

Additional Resources

http://drupal.org/coding-standards
http://api.drupal.org
http://drupal.org/contributors-guide
http://www.drupalbook.com
http://codex.wordpress.org/CodexCommunity_Portal
http://codex.wordpress.org/Contributing_to_WordPress
http://wordpress.org/support
http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists#Documentation