Addison "add1sun" Berry is the Drupal project's documentation team lead, as well as a developer, themer, cat herder, and generally awesome person. :)

I met Addi at the very first Lullabot workshop in Washington, DC in October 2006. Addi really stood out from the crowd with her obvious desire to help other people learn; if the person next to her looked bewildered about what was going on at the front of the room, she'd stop what she was working on and help them. She'd ask really great questions that would help frame difficult material in a way that new users could understand. And obviously, the good first impressions stuck; she's now helping to teach Lullabot workshops as part of the team. :)

A few months later as we were preparing Drupal 5 for release, I posted to the Drupal Dojo group about some "low-hanging fruit" code style clean-up patches that needed to be written. I tried to make the post as clear as possible what needed to be done, but wasn't ultimately sure if we'd get anyone to bite. Lo and behold within a week or so, this "add1sun" person had gone nuts and finished off about half of them. :) But rolling patches wasn't enough; she also created a how-to video to show other people what she'd learned, which remains one of our most invaluable resources for getting new contributors started.

While Addi was officially made the Drupal Documentation Team Lead back in October 2008, she had been coordinating larger documentation team efforts for quite some time before that. In Drupalcon Szeged, and again in Drupalcon DC, she helped identify a number of tasks for new folks to work on, and mobilized a small army to tackle tasks such as incorporating comments into documentation, filling in missing documentation gaps, and more. Addi excels at turning people who want to help but don't know where to start into completely immersed, rock-star contributors. And now that she has received funding from the Knight Foundation to make Drupal documentation rock, she'll be able to spread this message all over the world.

See the theme here? Addi rocks! ;)

What I think makes Addi's story even more remarkable is that she does not come from any kind of technical background; her educational background is in anthropology, and her job prior to Lullabot was stamping papers in a federal court. She taught herself HTML, CSS, PHP, and Drupal. She went up an enormous learning curve at a frenetic pace and has managed to turn herself into a superstar contributor in a very short period of time. She's a true symbol for everyone out there that anyone who puts their mind to it can not only overcome the Drupal learning curve, but can excel at bringing others up along with them as well.

You rock, Addi! :)

If you'd like, you can read more about Addi at Virginia DeBolt's interview on BlogHer.

Arie Nagel (or ainigma32 on Drupal.org) is a relatively "new" face in the Drupal community (he has yet to reach his one-year anniversary on Drupal.org), but yet has already made a profound impact on our project for the better.

How? By answering the cries of fellow Drupalistas' requests for help!

Arie has done a laudable job farming the Drupal core issue queue for support requests, closing out old ones, asking for more info on unclear ones, and helping out on those that he can. His tracker page shows a nearly endless stream of helpful, courteous responses, and he shows genuine concern for making sure users find the answers they're looking for. This is a tremendous contribution to the Drupal project. Hats off to you, Arie! :D

Without spoiling the interview ahead of time, something that Arie alludes to that I can back up whole-heartedly is that helping other users with support requests is the single fastest way to skyrocket your way up the Drupal learning curve. If you don't know the answer to something, seeking out the answer for others will give you a chance to teach yourself in a very practical way (or learn from others who end up answering the person's question). And if you do know the answer, nothing cements a topic in your head more than explaining to others how to do it. Finally, even if you consider yourself a total "newbie", believe me, you still know more than someone else out there, and you are far better positioned to explain it to them in a way that makes sense.

Learn more about how to get involved in user support at the Getting Involved guide.

Here's Arie's interview where he discusses how he came to Drupal, what motivates him to help out, and some ideas for improving Drupal support in the future.

It's 2009, and Contributor Spotlight is back! This edition, we focus on Daniel F. Kudwien (sun on drupal.org and "tha_sun" in #drupal), CEO of Unleashed Mind.

Daniel is a rock-star Drupal coder who has contributed too many awesome modules to count. A few that you might be familiar with are Administration Menu, which makes the Drupal administrative interface a breeze to use, Upgrade Status, which gives you details on the porting status of your modules between major Drupal versions, and WYSIWYG API, a module with the goal to provide a single, centralized way to add any graphical editor you can imagine to Drupal.

Daniel has a real knack for staring down an extremely complicated problem, ruthlessly slapping away distractions, and coming up with an ingenious solution that not only solves the original problem, but does so with elegance.

Which brings us to the tale of node #8: Let users cancel their accounts.

node/8 is the oldest open Drupal core issue in existence, dating back to 2001. The deceptively simple title makes it seem like this would be a brain-dead problem to solve. Just provide a button for users to delete their own accounts. Duh! What's the problem?

The problem is, what happens when that button is clicked? Is the user account deleted from the database, or only blocked? Some organizations have legal requirements to retain data for 180 days, others have legal requirements to remove all traces of their users. But even trickier, what happens to the content that the user posted? Is it deleted as well? Scrubbed of contents? Attributed to the anonymous user? Simply unpublished? What about other users' content that might reference content posted by removed users, or might be direct replies? Do they get the axe, too?

If you read the issue comments, you will see people coming up with absolutely no shortage of opinions on all of the above, and multiple times, this has caused the issue to go completely off the rails. Most of us had lost hope, thinking node/8 would never get solved.

And then along came Daniel.

With swift precision, Daniel managed to distill the use cases down to the four most common, provide a hook so that other modules can cut in and do their business, and all the while rallying the troops in #drupal to contribute where they could, either by bouncing around ideas or providing language improvements or reviewing the code. And! I'm happy to report that node/8 was fixed at last earlier today, January 8... 8 days after Daniel began his journey. :) This was an inspiring process to watch and to be a part of, and showed that anything is possible if we all band together.

So, who is this mystery man? Is he tenacious, a little bit insane, or both? ;) Find out, in the following interview!

This month's Contributor Spotlight goes to Adam Light (aclight on drupal.org).

Adam first showed up on my radar as he was taking a dive into the radioactive, vampire shark-infested waters of the Project and Project issue tracking module's issue queues, contributing bug reports and fixes. These modules are notoriously fraught with legacy issues (since they're almost as old as Drupal itself, but have about 1/100,000th of the eyes/hands on them), and they also happen to be the cornerstone of drupal.org, providing both the downloads of Drupal core and contributed modules and themes, as well as the developer tools that we use every day to build them.

Anyone who helps our esteemed Derek Wright tame these wild animals gets a medal of honour, in my book. And, incidentally, if you're looking for a fast-track to becoming a Drupal hero, head over to the Issue tracking and software releases group to find out how you can help.

But it doesn't stop there!

Along came the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, which opened the doors for dozens of secondary-school students to get their start in open source by taking on bite-sized tasks for the Drupal project. While the contest has been a rousing success, it was obvious early on that the administration of GHOP was completely overwhelming the small group of volunteers we had initially assembled.

I put out a desperate plea for help; Adam answered, with gusto! Not only did he help come up with some of the initial tasks for the program, he has he been in #drupal-ghop daily to talk with students and help answer their questions, and he's also been reviewing students' work and rallying others to do the same. He's even taken a lead on the tedious-but-all-important administrative "plumbing" that keeps the contest running. Want to help usher in the new generation of Drupal contributors? Find out how you can help with GHOP.

Is Adam some kind of saint, who we should all gaze upon with awe and amazement? A masochist who just enjoys the very worst punishment we as a project can devise? You decide! ;)

Here's what he had to say for himself in an interview.

This edition of Contributor spotlight highlights Keith Smith of Advantix, LLC.

Keith's mission for the past year or so has been to clean up user-facing text in Drupal core. People installing the next beta/RC of Drupal 6 should be pleasantly surprised by all of the improvements, which probably number in the hundreds by now.

Here's one example. In Drupal 5.x, the description for book pages is:

A book is a collaborative writing effort: users can collaborate writing the pages of the book, positioning the pages in the right order, and reviewing or modifying pages previously written. So when you have some information to share or when you read a page of the book and you didn't like it, or if you think a certain page could have been written better, you can do something about it.

Er. A book is an effort? :)

In Drupal 6.x, it's now:

A book page is a page of content, organized into a collection of related entries collectively known as a book. A book page automatically displays links to adjacent pages, providing a simple navigation system for organizing and reviewing structured content.

Simple, descriptive, and consistent with other type descriptions. This is why we love Keith.

These types of improvements are especially important to get hammered out now, because very soon (once Drupal 6 Release Candidate 1 hits) we'll be in "string freeze," which means that this type of text can't change anymore until Drupal 7, in order to allow translators to come in and do their thing. Since one of the killer features in Drupal 6 is the new internationalization stuff, this will be especially important this release. So don't delay; help with string fixes today! ;) If you're looking for a place to start, try the list of documentation issues in Drupal core.

I asked Keith some questions and here's what he had to say:

Note: This is something new I'm playing with, called the "Contributor spotlight." I spend a lot of time on the Drupal.org site (no, seriously. A LOT. ;)), and in doing so, often come across individuals who are doing an incredibly awesome job. I sometimes send off a little personal e-mail to thank them, but this is an attempt to be a little more public with the praise, and to help draw some more attention to these folks and their efforts. So, without further ado, meet catch.

catch is a web developer hailing from the United Kingdom, and has used Drupal since the 4.5.x era on http://libcom.org/.

In order to help get familiar with some of the changes in 6.x, catch has taken it upon himself to go through the core issue queue and really help things clean up: marking duplicate and fixed issues as such, moving new features to the 7.x queue, and testing patches that need review, then marking things "ready to be committed" or "needs work" as appropriate. This is a tremendous contribution, as it helps the core development team to focus on the truly important issues, and his work will directly help Drupal 6 ship much sooner. And it's worth pointing out here that issue queue clean-up is an area that pretty much anyone with just a little spare time can help with.

I asked catch a few questions via e-mail, and this is what he had to say...