At DevCollab, we pride ourselves in building high quality, accessible websites for nonprofits. To do this we’ve specialized in two open source content management systems: Drupal and WordPress.
Open source tools are unique in that their success relies on a healthy ecosystem of both users and contributors. This is something that Drupal founder Dries Buytaert outlines in his blog post, Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source.
He lays out some definitions,
“Makers directly invest in growing both their business and the Open Source project. Takers are solely focused on growing their business and let others take care of the Open Source project they rely on.”
As a company that values the open web and tech justice, we are mindful about giving back to the open source community that our business benefits from. A concrete way of doing that is in our certification as a Drupal Partner. You can find DevCollab’s Drupal profile here: https://www.drupal.org/devcollaborative-llc.
Investing in Open Source as a Certified Drupal Partner
To be certified as a Drupal Partner an agency must,
“demonstrate significant innovation, philanthropic leadership and contribution to the Drupal project. “
When the Drupal Partner program was announced, it was a natural fit for DevCollab. To qualify, it was a matter of recording the ways we already contribute back to the Drupal project.
Community Building as Contribution
Volunteering our time to organize events for nonprofits using Drupal is the main way we give back. In fact, I first met Erin and Johanna when I volunteered at the New York City Drupal Nonprofit Summit. We continued to stay in touch through the monthly Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) Drupal Chats that Johanna co-moderates. Johanna has co-led several Nonprofit Summits for DrupalCon, including the upcoming one at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025.
I eventually joined the DevCollab team because of this generous, community-minded spirit. In addition to organizing events, DevCollab is a regular financial sponsor of camps and conferences. Collectively we have given over a dozen talks, presentations and workshops sharing our knowledge with others.
We also give back at the code level. The starter theme we use (Lightship) is free and open for anyone to use. Our developers regularly contribute patches back to Drupal modules.
Making Drupal Better through User-Friendly Design and Accessible Code
As product owner, one of the first initiatives I led after joining the company was reviewing with our dev team the modules we regularly use in order to find one to help maintain. We settled on MaxLength, a module that allows a sitebuilder to define a recommended character limit on a field, such as a summary. After adopting the module, we shepherded it to a stable release with security coverage and made it more accessible and easy to use. As a result, we increased adoption of MaxLength by 13,335 websites.
We’ve gone on to adopt and improve Admin Menu Swap, In Other Words and Comment Notify as well. Our emphasis on accessibility also lead us to make accessibility improvements to the Collapsiblock and View Show More modules.
By being Drupal Partners, we not only demonstrate our technical expertise with the CMS, we also particpate makers in the project, and as members of the Drupal community.
Leave a comment