Thursday at Drupalcon Atlanta 2025: Contribution!

Contribution is the lifeblood of any open source project. This is especially true for a large project with a diversity of contributors like Drupal.

The contribution day at DrupalCon is a great opportunity to collaborate with and learn from some of the top minds in the community. For people who already work together but from geographic locations, it can also be a rare opportunity to collaborate in person. 

For Drupal as a project, however, contribution days are an opportunity to accelerate progress on important issues, since developers and the people who need to review their work can iterate quickly, given the opportunity for real-time feedback.

A popular tradition on contrib day is the “first commit”. The idea is to select an issue that has been worked on by someone who has never contributed to core before. There's a kind of ceremony as their work is merged into Drupal core, which celebrates both the importance of contribution by developers of all skills and experience, as well as the potential for even newcomers to our community to better the experience of everyone who uses a Drupal website. This year the work selected was an improvement to Drupal’s recipe system, but someone who had extensive experience mentoring others on contribution days, but hadn't personally contributed to core before.

Ultimately, everyone experiences DrupalCon’s renowned contribution days differently, depending on where they decide to spend their time and the other individuals who are available to collaborate on the same topic.

The two most prominent themes at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 were (not surprisingly) Drupal CMS and AI. It’s no surprise, then, that in addition to work on Drupal core, there was significant work done to help improve the recipes system, as well as plan out some important new directions for Drupal’s powerful and growing AI ecosystem.

For myself, I decided to follow some inspiration from Monday's community Summit. I wanted to seize on the recent momentum for the Event Platform, which recently gained a new major version along with some significant new capabilities, including built-in tools for camp organizers to rate and bulk moderate submitted sessions, as well as a new ability to store and display content from multiple events, for example each year of an annual camp.

In particular, I wanted to work with some of the organizers of the Florida DrupalCamp. Their website has been actively shared with other Drupal camp organizers, and was the original starting point for the Event Platform. More recently we’ve been discussing turning their newly revamped theme into a standalone project, and make it configurable so that no code would be required to get it set up for their own camp website.

Not only were we successful in getting the project created, but someone present used an AI tool to suggest names for it, and we enthusiastically agreed that Event Horizon would be a great choice. There's plenty more work to be done (which means lots more opportunities to contribute, for anyone interested) but being able to have these conversations in real time significantly accelerated the decisions and collaboration needed to get the initial version posted to Drupal.org.

It was a terrific way to wrap up a frenetic week of community, collaboration, and spirited discussions about how the future of Drupal will take shape.