Drupal 8.6 & Future and Contributing to Drupal Project

Learning Objectives:
i) Drupal 8.6 Features
ii) Drupal core release cycle: major, minor, and patch releases
iii) Drupal development roadmap
-> Migrate
-> Media
-> API-First
-> Layouts
-> Workflow
-> JavaScript Modernization
-> Out-of-the-Box
-> Community Initiatives
-> Community Challenges

iv) Ways to contribute code: Drupal core, contributed projects, and patches:

1. The Drupal code ecosystem encompasses the core of Drupal (the files that you get when you download Drupal from the Drupal project page), and "contrib" projects, which encompass all contributed code (modules, themes, installation profiles, etc.). You can read more about this distinction on the Core vs. contributed projects page. You can also improve both Drupal core and contributed projects by submitting patches.

v) Improving existing projects and core with patches:

1. If you'd like to make improvements (bug fixes, new features, and so on) to existing projects, such as Drupal core, or one of our contributed modules or themes.

2. Contributions to existing projects come in the form of patches, which allow you to share modifications you've made to a project with the maintainer and other users in the project's issue queue.
   -> What is a patch
   -> Creating patches (an overview)
   -> Advanced patch contributor guide (with detailed Git instructions)
   -> Applying patches (an overview)
   -> Applying patches with Git (advanced guide)

3. All project pages on drupal.org have a Version control tab which contains information on how to use Git to create patches for a given project.

vi) Contributing new projects:

If you've developed a new module or theme, you can also create your own project to contribute your code to Drupal.org.

There are two types of projects that you can create:

Full projects:
the standard downloadable modules and themes like Views and Zen. Read more about full projects.

Sandbox projects:
which are for experimental code, or code from new contributors who've not been through a vetting process yet. Read more about sandbox projects.

About Speaker:
Viswanath
Organizer, Drupal Hyderabad