Last week was my first time as a Drupal Core mentor at a DrupalCon event. 

Why does Drupal need mentors?

At DrupalCon Amsterdam, Dries mentioned in his key note that Drupal needs more people pitching in and contributing to Drupal Core. 

The Drupal community is growing, but the ratio of contributors to free loaders is getting worse. This is probably because people are struggling to get involved or don't understand which skills are needed.

To help overcome these barriers, DrupalCon events ask for people involved in Drupal Core to act as mentors.

How do you get involved?

First of all, you need to attend a mentor orientation session where you meet other mentors who share their experiences. At my orientation session, seasoned mentor Cathy Theys (YesCT) gave an excellent talk about what mentoring involves and what to expect.

Our introductions to each other were very amusing as we shared our Drupal.org usernames. Most of us felt it necessary to defend our choice of usernames with a full entomology and my personal favourite was eojthebrave (you'll have to ask him!).

What did I do as a mentor?

Last Wednesday I spent two hours triaging the issue queue, which contains issues with possible tasks suitable for novice contributors.

A novice is unlikely to complete a whole issue on their own, but there may be components of the issue, called tasks, that they can do. Tasks could include providing steps to reproduce a problem, feeding back on UX or design, taking screen shots or writing documentation. You do not always need to be a developer to contribute.

On Thursday I manned the mentor desk for a few hours. The DrupalCon events have a mentor desk manned by mentors who can advocate to delegates about contributing to Drupal Core and explain how to get involved. A key priority is to encourage delegates to attend a mentored sprint on the last day of DrupalCon, their first steps into the world of the Drupal Core community.

During the mentored sprints, more than 100 people got together to listen to a community tools presentation which covered the installation of everything you need to contribute, how to use the issue queue and comment and IRC etiquette.

Drupal 8 presentation

As a mentor, I gave a presentation to a small group of new contributors which helped them configure the tools and install Drupal 8 for the first time. For some, this was quite an achievement in itself.

Once set up with the tools, the new contributors broke up into smaller groups and selected issues to work on together with the aid of a mentor.

Critical issues

Some of the contributors I worked with looked at an issue to provide more user-friendly text on the 'Extend' section of the site. This was called 'Modules' on Drupal 7 and is where site administrators searched for modules to enable or disable them.

If the patch the contributors provided is committed, then the text they chose may appear on thousands of websites throughout the world - not bad for a short period of collaborative working!

The contributors also uncovered an issue in Drupal Core which we decided to mark as critical. Some of the new contributors were selected to have their finished patches committed directly into Drupal 8 by Drupal Core maintainer Angie Byron (webchick). Angie showed how the process of patch review and committing a patch to core works.

Après sprint

After a tiring, yet satisfying day, the mentors went to dinner together, where we discussed Drupal, development and PHPStorm.

Give it a try!

Being a mentor was a fantastic experience and I recommend it highly. I met some pretty incredible mentors and new contributors.

The Drupal community is made of a wide and varied skill base and everyone can get involved to make a difference to Drupal Core's quality.

If you've not contributed before, come along to the mentored sprint at the next DrupalCon.

If you can't wait that long, there is the Drupal Ladder which describes the small steps you can take to become a regular and useful contributor to Drupal Core.