Here's the presentation that Marianne Masculino and I did about how to contribute to both WordPress and Drupal:

It was really cool to see the overlap between how WordPress does stuff and how Drupal does stuff, and all the ways the communities are similar and how they're different in how they work. Also, Marianne was really awesome and nice. :)

Thanks to everyone who turned out to see it... It was great to meet you! :)

Also, I found a "live blogging" version of the session at http://www.sparkplugging.com/marketing/blogher-2008-open-source/.

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:

So I've been pretty busy the past few weeks coordinating efforts for Drupal's participation in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP). This is a contest which gives pre-university students (age 13-18) tasks to work on from various open source projects, both to get them "real world" experience in the open source community, and to win prizes such as t-shirts, cash, or even a trip to Google Campus.

So far the contest has been going on for about a week, and it's been quite a blast hanging in #drupal-ghop and the GHOP group, getting to know some of the students.

Some of the highlights include...

I did a recent interview that talked a bit about the upcoming Drupal O'Reilly book (code-named the "Lullabook"), how I got my start in the Drupal community, and how I went about surmounting the Drupal learning curve.

The short version is that, in my opinion, getting involved in the community is, hands down, the fastest way to ratchet up your Drupal knowledge. It was the only way I was able to make the leap from "total newbie" (who hadn't even installed Drupal at the time) to "contributing my first module" in 2 very short months (I started out my Drupal career as a Google Summer of Code student back in 2005).

It was a lot of fun to reflect back on my first couple months in the Drupal community, which included some of the following highlights. *cue the flashback wipe*

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...

Thanks to Khalid for the heads-up about a video out there of my Women in Open Source talk I gave last month at the Ontario Linux Fest. Check it out here: http://www.archive.org/details/onlinux_womeninopensource

The slides for this talk are also available at http://webchick.net/files/presentations/women-in-open-source-onlinux-200...