Drupalstan: What's up in the Indian Drupal community
Welcome to the first of a hopefully regular update on the Drupal community in India - Drupalistan!
Contribution spotlight: Capgemini helping with drupal.org testing
Drupal's massive growth has attracted some true global giants to our community. Capgemini is a 100k+ person consulting firm with over 35k employees in India. Apart from Capgemini's established reputation as a leader in large scale Drupal implementations, they are now also actively contributing to the community through drupal.org testing efforts.
The CG drupal.org contribution team consists of 3 developers with Drupal and PHP backgrounds. Apart from this, a Drupal architect [DurgaGopalPrasad] and a Manager[Rizwan Sayyad] also worked for part-time.
Team members:
Describe the project you worked on: (what was the goal, how did you accomplish it, who mentored you, etc):
The project is about automating the testing process of the upgrade work of drupal.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Behat is a PHP testing framework capable of running human-readable test cases against the application that needs to be tested. Test cases were written using Behat/Mink-extension and run against Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 development environments.
We had internal review process, daily & weekly scrum calls and weekly demos to keep things moving in sync. A project has been created on drupal.org to keep track of all the test cases and their current status. Project: http://drupal.org/project/doobie. During our six months we implemented, 655 scenarios that describe 134 features - in all 3,070 unique tests. We've supported these tests with code for the Drupal 6 branch of Drupal.org and have updated them all as much as possible for the Drupal 7 version as well.
Team has got consistent support from Melissa Anderson who had played a crucial role in directing and guiding the team and on prioritizing the work .We also got ample support from jhedstrom, sdboyer, tvn. Thanks to the many people who supported the effort in one way or another - halstead, nnewton, michaelemeyers, jhodgdon, Senpai, tizzo, KentBye, lotyrin, skjalf, dww, weaverryan, bleedev, nagwani, the Drupal Association, others.
What was your experience contributing to the community?
It was overall a very good experience contributing to the community. During the development, the team got excellent support from the Drupal community members in solving issues, overcome technical challenges, setting up environments and getting the work reviewed. We were surprised to see how many people had already taken up Behat and are trying them out. We got good exposure to the community and has benefitted by community members reviewing the code, their suggestions and enjoyed showcasing the work to larger audience.
Do you have any advice to anyone just starting with Drupal?
The new technology that we have learnt in this initiative is Behat. In general, we would advise anyone to go through Drupal tutorials(from textbooks or from drupal.org or Lullabot) first rather than just directly exploring Drupal. Getting more involved with Drupal community(drupal.org) will help in improving knowledge by sharing thoughts and also we get to meet good techies whose suggestions or comments will help in delivering a effective solution/software.
Upcoming events:
Feb 2nd: Hyderabad Meetup
http://groups.drupal.org/node/277328
Jan 26th: Bangalore
http://groups.drupal.org/node/274728
Jan 26th: Coimbatorehttp://groups.drupal.org/node/278193
Events last month:
Drupal Camp Delhi
Drupal India's largest event yet! Over 350 people got together to learn, laugh, party, do business and make friends at JNU's fantastic convention center in New Delhi on the 7th and 8th. The event featured a keynote by Jacob Singh, Acquia's India country head as well as sessions by Drupal experts from around India including Dipen Chaudhary (Pune), Shyamala Rajaram (Chennai),
Sumit Pareek (Kolkata) and Siva Epari (Hyderabad).
Many thanks JNU for the venue, the good folks at Srijan for organizing the event and of course all of the generous sponsors:
You can find videos of the event at http://drupalcampdelhi.com
Drupal Camp Mumbai
Mumbai held it's 2nd annual Drupal Camp as well with over 150 participants at the Mukesh Patel College of Technology Management & Engineering - a part of their larger hackfest. The event featured a twelve year old Drupaler, Karan! (pictured below). The videos for the event may be found @ http://groups.drupal.org/node/265638#comment-865463
Keynote at this event was delivered by Jacob Singh. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M3ZidFg0jk
Many thanks to the organizers, particularly Rachit Gupta from Blisstering and the following sponsors:
Drupal training day in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur
Drupal training day was held in Bangalore (40 participants), Mumbai (30), Chennai (20) and Jaipur (50). This initiative is particularly important in India where many students and developers do not have adequate access to find out about Drupal
Bangalore:
Bangalore saw a very successful Training Day camp on Dec 14th 2012, at KNS Technologies, Bangalore, with over 40 attendees.
An amount of $118.84 was raised at the camp and was donated to Aaron Winborn Special Needs Trust.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/269743#comment-864503
Thanks to KNS Technologies (knstek.com) for sponsoring a beautiful venue for the event.
Chennai:
In Chennai Drupal Training workshop was conducted on Dec 14th 2012 at Unimity Solutions. The first half of the workshop targeted to introducing Drupal by providing a hands on session starting from installing drupal to configuring drupal. The second half of the workshop was a presentation on: Understand what's in store in Drupal 8, dive back in and contribute!
Number of participants: 14
Event link: http://groups.drupal.org/node/271193
Presentation link: http://www.slideshare.net/shyamdrupal/what-in-store-in-drupal-8-15753769
Credits to Shreenivas Ransubhe for the awesome logo and and Shyamla, Rachit, Tanay and Dipen for helping with the content
Tags:
mm_t: