Written on August 27, 2012 - 20:19

Last week, I attended the Field API pre Drupalcon sprint in Munich. My major motivation was to start working on the conversion of Field API to CMI and little than a week later, we have a patch that is green. While there's still a lot of work on it, it's still a good feeling after one week of hacking and discussions. After driving 8 hours home after a fantastic week, I decided to step up as a co-maintainer of Field API. But me stepping up won't make the big difference, we need more people joining us!

Anyone can help in many different ways

• Gardening the queue: go through bug reports, ask for more info when something is not clear or close duplicates.
• You can work on an issue by creating patches. Assign an issue to yourself so we know who's working on it.
• Help by reviewing and testing patches to see if they actually work as intented.
• Come bring us coffee and cake :)

Where should I start ?

There's a lot of work, that's for sure: CMI, widget and formatter plugins, Field API vs OO and so on. We have a site which lists the most important issues: http://realize.be/field-api - Bookmark that if you're interested!

We are also available on freenode.net on #drupal-fieldapi in case you have any questions.

How much time should I invest in this ?

That is totally up to you. Remember, this is voluntary work, so we do not expect anybody to work 40 hours a week - although that would be more than fantastic of course :) As an example, this is roughly what I think my weekly schedule will look like:

1. Continue working further on the CMI patch. I have sponsored time from Wunderkraut so I can focus hard on getting this critical piece of functionality in. Goodbye field_config and field_config_instance tables!
2. Go through the queue twice a week for about an hour and review existing patches from other people.
3. Go through the queue twice a week for half an hour and close duplicates or ask for more info.
4. Pick one 'quick win' issue per week to create a patch from it, either a bug or feature request.
5. Work on Display Suite issue queue, this usually happens once a week for about 3 hours. Been like that since forever.

So wait, I thought you didn't sleep?

Yes I do, and I do other things as well. It's not worth spending all your nights on coding, you'll get burned out before you know it. But wouldn't it be great to go to sleep and someone else was doing some great work ?

So, who's helping along?