In anticipation of the June 3rd launch of Drupal 9, I spent the weekend a week previous to the launch dusting off the Drupal module I'm most famous for: the Pirate module! What does it do, exactly? Like the WP extension, the Pirate module changes your site's content to pirate-speak on September 19th, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I took the tagline ("Ah, Squiddy! I got nothing against ye. I just heard there was gold in yer belly. Ha ha har, ha ha ha har!"), which I buried in the configuration, from a non-pirate, sea captain Horatio McCallister. (Spoiler alert: He's not even a real sea captain.) It adds a text filter (previously known as an input format) to whatever field you specify, and on September 19th, that field's content is changed into various pirate-like sayings, interspersed with yarr! and avast! During Drupal's semantic versioning transition, versions 8.x-1.1 forward are intended to be fully compatible with Drupal 9.

The module started out as an internal ticket at Bryght in 2005. Boris Mann came across the Talk Like a Pirate plugin for WordPress, and since both Drupal and WordPress are written in PHP, he wanted it ported over. I took the ticket, 45 minutes before a colleague saw it and, almost 15 years later, it serves as the project I use to keep up with Drupal internals. Thanks to a patch from Snehal Brahmbhatt, later confirmed by a robot, I am able to legitimately claim that the module has full Drupal 9 compatibility. (Unlike the move from Drupal 7 to 8, Drupal 9 is an update, not a rebuild.) It has had an official release for all versions of Drupal since 4.6.

Over the weekend of updating the module for D9, I caught wind of DrupalSpoons, and without fulling realizing the implications, I applied to have the Pirate module mirrored there. (Moshe was excited!) After reading the DrupalSpoons announcement, I understood it to be an experiment in using GitLab as the issue queue and repository platform more directly than the Drupal core and contributed modules projects, which uses GitLab as an underlying provider for their official repositories. As long as code and issues are synced between the two, I don't have a problem pushing and responding in both spaces.

I'm looking forward to September 19th this year and years to come. Yarr!