I’m about to complete four weeks with my GSoC project and its been a great experience. I’m working on the Entity Embed module for Drupal 8. Dave Reid (davereid), Janez Urevc (slashrsm) and Shashwat Srivastava (darklrd) are my mentors for this project and all of them are extremely helpful. Besides my mentors, I’m also recieving excellent support from the Drupal community expecially the Drupal Media Initiative.
Dave already had a prototype ready when I started so I didn’t have to start from scratch which was really helpful. Janez always helps me to decide on how to implent new features and to tackle the issues. Florian Weber (webflo) demonstrated how this module can be integrated with CKEditor using an example in very early stages which greatly helped me to accomplish the actual integration. Jibran Ijaz (jibran) and Boris Gordon (boztek) continuously help with code reviews and provide relevant suggestions. Steve Persch (stevector) had developed a similar module with Twig functionality. Now he has filed an issue to include Twig functionality in this module, and once that issue lands the module will be more flexible. There are many other senior contributors who’ve helped me while I’m working on this module.
Though the learning curve is not very steep, I always learn something new something new almost everyday. To sum it up, it has been a very fun journey so far and I hope the remaining two months will also be the same. Things are going smooth and I’m pretty confident the project will be finished in due time.
The module is live on drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/entity_embed. Though more recent development can be found on the github repo: https://github.com/drupal-media/entity_embed. Details of all the contributors can be found here: https://github.com/drupal-media/entity_embed/graphs/contributors. Here’s what my contribution history on github looks like.
See that large green chunk in the right side, that is the time period of past 4 weeks for which I’ve been working on this module. And as you can probably see, those 4 weeks are the times when I’ve been most active and it feels really great to be working on this module along side some of most experienced Drupal contributors.
Since I’ve recieved such an excellent support and love from the community, I thought its only fair to I give back some of the love. I hang out on the IRC channels are try to help if I can. In the same spirit, I’ve applied to be a mentor for GCI. I believe this will be a wonderful opportunity for me to help new contributors get started. I’ve applied to be a mentor and I’ve my fingers crossed that I’ll be selected as one. Regardless of whether I’m selected or not, I’ll try to update the task organization wiki for GCI: https://groups.drupal.org/node/357333 as and when I get some interesting ideas.
While I have the chance I want to sum up this post on the future of Drupal 8. Based on my experience with this project, I’ll try to comment from a Drupal Media perspective. Firstly, I am firm believer that Drupal is heading towards a “Beyond body field” space. Since, there’s an increasing demand of media components by users and users like more media-rich content on their sites. With this kind of a demand, a good set of media modules is really necessary for Drupal 8 and I believe Drupal shuld support better media solutions out of the box. In DrupalCon Austin 2014, there was an excellent talk by Janez and Dave: FILE ENTITY AND MEDIA MODULES | LET’S FIX FILE AND MEDIA HANDLING. (For instance, I should be able to embed this video in my blog using Drupal core out of the box. I hope we’ll have such features in core in near future.)