Updated on May 31st, 2023

With thousands of active contributors to the development of the Drupal open-source content management system, the strength of the Drupal community continues to propel its growth and innovation. Our team has contributed to Drupal and created innovative Drupal digital experiences for over 10 years. We are also annual supporters and attendees of the DrupalCon and Acquia Engage conferences and have won several awards for our projects. In 2021, Northern and Albany Law School were recognized as the Engage Award winner in the Leader of the Pack in the Education category. In addition, Northern and London Hydro were recognized as the Engage Award winner in the Leader of the Pack in the Energy/Utilities category.

The annual Drupal Global Contribution Weekend, where Drupal User Group Meetups all over the world volunteer for Drupal development time and make open-source contributions, is this weekend, Jan. 28-30th, 2022.  Northern will be hosting a virtual contribution event, on Saturday, Jan. 29th, 2022 from 10 am - 4 pm EST. Whether you’re an experienced developer or a newcomer to Drupal, there are a variety of ways in which you can participate. You can come for the whole day or drop by for an hour or two. For students, this is a great opportunity to meet people in the Drupal community.

Northern’s event will be held as follows:
Saturday, Jan. 29, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m EST. 

Register on meetup to access the group Zoom link for the event. We hope to see you there!

Pre-Attendance Checklist

  1. Create a user account on Drupal.org if you do not have one
  2. Install Git on your computer
  3. Make sure your computer has a local development environment* (more on this later)
  4. Set up Drupal*
  5. Have some knowledge of how to create and apply patches using git*

Do as many of these steps beforehand as you can, especially if you have not contributed to Drupal core before. If you need help with one or more, someone can help you on the day. *Not mandatory if you plan to contribute to documentation or marketing issues instead of code.

Resources for Beginners

Local Development Environment

To have a successful contribution weekend you will need a solid local development environment and to install the latest development branch of Drupal. You can use any local environment you are comfortable with, either Pantheon, XAMPP, or the Acquia Dev desktop, would have what you need.

  • Pantheon sandbox is easy to set up. You can work with it either in SFTP or Git mode if you don't want to set up a server on your computer. 
  • XAMPP is a simple, lightweight Apache distribution that works well to create a local web server for testing and deployment purposes.
  • The Acquia dev desktop local comes with almost all the tools you would ever need - Apache, PHP, MySQL and drush - and it installs Drupal in one click so you can get going faster.