I've been having fun for the last few weeks building an interactive data visualisation tool, The Drupal8r, to show how the Drupal community is coming together to develop the next release, Drupal 8.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free open-source web development platform which is designed to support online content, community and commerce. We've been using it since 2007.

Because it is open-source and built, developed and maintained by a huge global community who constantly update it as technology evolves.

Drupal 8, the latest release, is coming soon.

There are more than half a million people in the Drupal community, all working to make it the best platform around and usually in their spare time. 

We wanted to celebrate the community's collaboration and show who is making some of the biggest contributions and commitments in getting Drupal 8 ready for launch. And so the idea for The Drupal8r was born.

The Drupal community

There are hundreds of people in the Drupal community who write the platform's core code as their community contribution (called the contributors). This code is tested and reviewed by a handful of people who then commit it to the core (known as the committers).

D3 data visualisation

I used the d3.js JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data and Drupal git-log data to build a chart which displays the names of code contributors and committers with their corresponding Drupal 8 modules. At the moment you can view data from the latest 5000 commits to Drupal 8.

Have a go!

Have a play with The Drupal8r, our fun and interactive data visualisation tool to see who has committed and contributed to modules for the next release of Drupal 8. 

Come and play with The Drupal8r now.

For mobile users

The text is small for mobile users and our human eyes haven't quite caught up with technology yet. So, have a look at this short video to see how it works instead.

The Drupal8r data visualisation tool

Keep in mind

When using it for just committers or contributors, the width of the connection represents the number of commits. When you are viewing both,  the width of the connection has no meaning. 

The Drupal8r can only show a certain amount of items on the page, by default The Drupal8r shows 100 items. It shows all the modules and committers, but the number of contributors are capped and grouped together under 'other'.

Four things The Drupal8r shows

1. A lot of people contribute - getting Drupal 8 ready is a massive team effort. It isn't just one person contributing to each module, but many people. Thanks everyone!
2. In terms of pure numbers, Alex Pott, Webchick, and Nathaniel Catchpole have been the most prolific contributors to the Drupal 8 project. Impressive stuff.
3. But the number of commits isn't necessarily a reasonable measure of an individual's contribution. Dries Buytaert and Jennifer Hodgdon may have been focusing on the bigger issues. The core team have reviewed and tested more than 5000 bug patches and bring us close to Drupal 8's launch - what a feat.
4. For those in the Drupal community, see if you can spot the person who is in there twice under different names...

Coming soon...

Next month I'm going to write another blog post over here on Labs about how I made The Drupal8r and the technologies used.

I'll be enhancing The Drupal8r over the next few months. I'm going to add an option to download more data to include in the chart and a contributor filter, so you'll be able to link to a particular contributor's commits.

Don't miss out on our development of the chart, so sign up to our newsletter below to keep in the loop.