Restarting My Drupal Life

Its been more than three months since my last post here on Drupal Mill. A lot to do with changes in my own life, such as moving back to my home country Sweden. Getting everything setup and organized have taken a lot of time. Now when that is done and dusted I am going to have more time for this site, as well as many other Drupal projects I am working on.

Since I created Drupal Mill over a year ago a lot has happened with Drupal 7, especially when it comes to contributed modules. I find it quite amazing that Drupal 7 already counts for 43% of all sites using Drupal. That is simply a phenomenal endorsement to all the hard work the community put into it and continue to do.

Lately, I have spent quite a bit of time looking into changes I want to make with the site, as well as how to create a solid foundation that can be reused on most of the sites I want to build. Now I have a pretty good idea about how to do that and also started the development of it. Hopefully I will be able to start rolling out changes soon, including the many new exiting features I have planned.

I have also been reviewing my own activities and engagement within the community, especially on drupal.org and its sister sites. My conclusion is that before I simply spread my limited time on way to many different things, often ending up in long meta discussions/debates that resulted in little. Sure, I learned a lot about the community and how it works, but right now I simply don't have the luxury of a lot of time. I simply need to focus on those parts that are most productive for me and the projects I am working on. It will be hard to ignore the itch of sidetracking from that though...

Media, Pathauto and Token

In light of the above, outside Drupal projects that are directly related to my own projects, my community focus will be on helping out with the Media, Pathauto and Token projects. Even though I am not a hardcore developer, there are plenty of things I can help out with.

The Media module, and related File Entity module, is for me two vital project that needs all the help they can get. We all know that media management isn't really Drupals cup of tea. It is OK (to be nice), but it is far from where it needs to be. With an internet that is more and more about audio and video, then Drupal simply need a solid support for this. I am going to do what I can to help pushing this, which mostly will be helping out in the issue queue, including testing patches. I am also one of the Admins for the Media Group and plan to spend some time shortly on restructuring it to make it more useful for the community.

Then I will also help out with support for the Pathauto and Token modules (mainly Drupal 7 related issues). I like helping people, plus that working with support is a great way of learning to better use something. Often you even get questions about ways of using something you never would have thought about otherwise. Its something I can recommend to any Drupal user and I'm sure the module maintainers would be very grateful for your help.

So, there you have it. I am back and ready for restarting my Drupal life. If everything goes according to plan, things will start to happen here in no time at all.