fidzu : cms

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.