Talking Drupal #490 - Drupal Contrib First

February 24, 2025

Today we are talking about Drupal Contribution, how you can approach it within your company, and why a Contrib First approach is important with guest Steve Wirt. We’ll also cover Config Importer & Tools as our module of the week.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • What is contrib first
  • How does this help the Drupal community
  • Why is it a good idea for companies
  • How do you explain this to non dev folks like CEOs or Presidents
  • What do you say if a client does not buy in
  • How do you monitor and build confidence in other developers
  • How can someone get started
  • Any tools or tips for someone trying to bootstrap this
  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to streamline the management of config changes during your Drupal project deployment - importing individual configuration changes from contrib or custom modules and synchronizing settings across different environments? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in April 2016 by Andrii Podanenko(podarok)
    • Versions available: 3.2.0 version which works with Drupal 9 and 10, D11 fixes are in the queue.
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained - although it’s a developer module that’s been mostly stable, so there have not been many recent changes.
    • Security coverage
    • Test coverage - unit tests
    • Documentation - video documenting the process on the module page and instructions in the project overview
    • Number of open issues: 8 open issues, 3 of which are bugs against the current branch
  • Usage stats:
    • 300 sites
  • Maintainer(s):
    • 7 maintainers across a few different agencies in Ukraine
  • Module features and usage
    • This module has no UI, and all of its work is done using it’s config_import services, either importer or param_updater
    • The importer service imports full config files
    • The param_updater service pulls in single parameters from a config file.
    • Both can be used in .install files of contrib modules or on your own site to pull in configuration during database updates, which can be helpful for adding a new feature, modifying existing features, or pushing changes to many sites.
    • There is also a “spiritual successor” to the Confi module called “Upgrade Tool” which has similar functionality with some extra functionality too. https://www.drupal.org/project/upgrade_tool