fidzu : Drupal

This is the second post in a three-part series about the impact of the AWS Open Source Credits program on the Drupal community. Part one covered our testing infrastructure. Part three will cover the AI era and what we're exploring next.

When people talk about open source infrastructure, they usually mean git repositories and CI runners, and that's what our first post covered. But Drupal is a 25-year-old project with a global community, and the infrastructure that holds that community together goes well beyond code.

This post is about the rest of it: our translation platform, the contribution credit system, the tools for organizing events, and the community archives that AWS credits help keep online. We build the tools that enable our community to build Drupal, and many of those tools have nothing to do with merge requests.

Translating Drupal

Localize.drupal.org is our community translation platform, where more than 8,500 contributors work across 119 language groups. Together they have recorded nearly 1.8 million translations of more than 1.4 million source strings, across more than 33,000 projects.

Behind those numbers is a crucial pipeline: every time a maintainer ships a release, the platform parses it and extracts the translatable strings automatically. So far it has parsed more than 211,000 releases and scanned more than 15.8 million files. Translators then do the part that needs people: deciding how Drupal should read in their own language. In August, localize.drupal.org was one of the last services we moved off the old hardware at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab and onto AWS. Coming very soon, we'll be deploying an upgrade of localize.drupal.org to modern Drupal, thanks to an important group of community contributors.

Localization is how open source reaches people beyond the English-speaking developer world, and for many contributors, translating Drupal into their own language is the first contribution that leads to a greater contribution journey.

Recognizing the work that doesn't show up in git

Drupal does something rare among major open source projects: we record contribution, including work that isn't code, and credit both the people who do it and the organizations that sponsor them. Documentation, event organizing, mentoring, marketing, and accessibility work can all earn credit in our Contribution Records system, alongside code. In the three years to this September, it recorded more than 217,000 credits for more than 14,000 people.

Most of that credit still goes to code, because code is the easiest work to see, and we're working to change that. This fall we launched the Advocacy Program pilot, which awards credit for work that helps people discover and understand Drupal, and organizations can now see the events they sponsor in their Owner Tools on Drupal.org.

The reason we do this is practical: organizations choosing a Drupal partner can see who contributes, which gives companies a reason to sponsor their people's time, including for work that never touches the codebase. We've written about the limits of any credit system, and we adjust ours as we learn, most recently by raising the weight of core and core security work.

The community's calendar, and its memory

Communities organize, and organizing takes tooling. We run events.drupal.org for DrupalCon, and the community events calendar on Drupal.org holds the record of more than 1,700 past events going back to 2004, from local meetups to volunteer-run DrupalCamps around the world, with dozens more on the calendar now.

Why we think this matters beyond Drupal

Most of the conversation about open source sustainability focuses on paying maintainers, and for good reason. But there is a second gap that gets less attention: infrastructure for everyone around the maintainers, like the translators, event organizers, documentation writers, and the people who mentor new contributors. Many of the people who come to Drupal.org never open a merge request, and they need tools too.

Most projects never build this layer because nobody funds it. Fortunately, cloud credits are a practical way to close this gap: they pay for the servers under the translation platform and the events calendar just as they pay for CI. When AWS supports our infrastructure, it supports the community around the code as well as the code itself.

What's next in this series

In our final post: what the AI era is doing to demand on open source infrastructure, where our community's contribution numbers stand today, and how we're thinking about AI tooling for contributors who want it, not only those whose employers pay for it.

The Drupal Association is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. If your organization depends on Drupal, or on the health of open source infrastructure generally, you can support our work.

In the Open is a weekly series from Drupal Association Interim CEO Tiffany Farriss, sharing what she is hearing across the Drupal community and where the Association is headed. In this episode: what the Drupal Association team took away from its first all-staff retreat in three years, how the Drupal certification program is evolving, and what's coming up with the Rosetta Sprint and DrupalCon Orlando 2027.

"There are some things and some conversations that can only seem to happen when we're all together."

The following is a transcript of Tiffany's remarks, lightly edited for readability.

Being in one room

I'm Tiffany Farriss, the Interim CEO of the Drupal Association, and this is In the Open, my regular update on what's happening at the Association as we navigate a year of change.

Top of mind for me is just how important and accelerating being together in person is. For the first time in three years, the entire Drupal Association staff was in one room. Drupal and the DA collaborate across global time zones every day. That's just how it works. But there are some things and some conversations that can only seem to happen when we're all together in the same place at the same time.

Why we exist

In our DA retreat, we spent a lot of time talking about why we exist. I know you know this, but a handful of companies now run most of the web, whether it's cloud or search or browsers, and increasingly AI. Whoever runs your infrastructure gets a say in whether or how you get to use it. Using open source and Drupal offers a different, more sovereign option, a different future, if you will.

Drupal is a registered digital public good that enterprises and governments, the UN, and humanitarian and academic organizations rely on. So all of us at the DA traced a piece of our work to someone that it helps specifically, and then we mapped it to how it serves, whether it's the makers who build Drupal, the advocates who share the message about what Drupal is and what it could do, or the patrons who fund it.

Every single role at the Drupal Association is essential to how we steward our open source project, how Drupal is actually able to manage the commons that we have. And a lot of that work is stuff that folks in the community may not ever really see or notice.

Evolving Drupal certification

This led us to our biggest strategic conversation of the week: the Drupal certification program.

I talked about this a little bit at Rotterdam. I feel like it's the only thing I talk about these days. But for the last 25 years of Drupal, a really small group, mostly agencies and individuals, have been buying the round for millions of people around the world who use and run Drupal. And we're super deeply grateful for that.

But as we all know, the agency landscape is changing, and it's time for everyone who benefits from Drupal to buy a round too. As a 501(c)(3) program, we need to make sure that our mission serves the public interest. We're not a trade association. We can't give advantage to anyone or even just a few companies.

Those are real guardrails that we talked a lot about at the DA. The revamped Drupal certification is not a partner program. It's not a trade association. We're evolving it to be a public registry about those who engage with the Drupal ecosystem in a net neutral or a net positive way, and we're going to build it on facts that we can verify about how organizations contribute.

By designing Drupal certification, it will include the entire ecosystem. Agencies, yes, of course. Hosting and platform providers, definitely, but also infrastructure providers, technology and third-party integrations, and global systems integrators. People who have been using Drupal, and we see them occasionally contributing in small ways, but we want to encourage them to be able to participate more.

AI has made code cheap, and what we've realized is that trust is precious. So you're going to hear more about this idea of trust and Drupal trust over the coming months.

How we work together

We also talked a lot about how we work. Individuals here at the DA have worked side by side, some of them for many, many years. What we're shifting to, though, is actually working together cross-functionally on things that relate to all of us.

So that's really exciting, and I think that just reminded me that the DA needs to get together regularly and think about what it does and how we serve the Drupal community. I'm coming out of that very energized, and I also know that we're not the only ones who need to get together regularly.

The Rosetta Sprint

Dries has proposed an in-person Rosetta Sprint for early January, and I think that's coming together now. The idea with Rosetta is that Drupal modules describe what they can do once, so that AI assistants, front ends, and workflow tools can all use that same description, with no custom integration work for each kind of task you might want to do.

So if you maintain a module, Dries' post explains how to start now, and I've put the link below.

DrupalCon Orlando 2027

Obviously, the biggest place we all come together as a Drupal community, and where that energy is really palpable, is DrupalCon. If you haven't yet, please check out our DrupalCon Orlando site. Registration is open now for 2027.

This will be the first time since the absolutely epic DrupalCon Australia, which I missed sadly, that we're going to be at a resort, an 1,100-acre resort, the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida. It's in the Disney Springs area, right near Disney.

So you won't want to miss it. Obviously, there will be sessions and contribution and the hallway track all in one place. But I do want to make sure that you know it is spring break week. So if staying on site with everyone really matters to you, I do encourage you to both register for DrupalCon and book your hotel now. We may be able to add more rooms, but not until the ones we already have are gone.

So you're not going to want to miss it. The local team is deep in planning amazing things, and I know that they've started to recruit for the new Drupal's Got Talent. So whatever your act is, we want to see it, so please do apply.

I'm putting links below to everything. So thank you to the DA team for a really great week together. Thank you to everyone who builds, champions, and funds Drupal, and I hope to see you in Orlando, if not before.

Follow the conversation

New episodes of In the Open publish each week. Subscribe on the Drupal Association YouTube channel to follow along.

With thanks to Stephen Cross of Second Signal Media for producing this series.