I was working with new contributors tonight. They had worked on 2-4 issues before. They wanted to test a patch in dealing with a Drupal 8 multilingual issue. Sure, testing d8mi issues is a bit more tricky than regular core issues. Because a module usually needs to be enabled first, like Language or Content translation. But I think the lessons learned from this experience apply to any core issue.

Steps to reproduce in a comment are nice. Putting them in the issue summary is even better.

This issue had Steps to reproduce in comment 3 out of 25, which is really great. Some issues do not have any steps to reproduce. Even though this issue had Steps to reproduce, I saw these two contributors spend 15 minutes wondering how to get to the settings page that needed testing. And then they wondered how to get the translation bits to show there. Once I pointed out the comment that had the steps, they were on their way. One did the testing... and the other updated the issue summary and put the Steps to reproduce right there in the issue summary. They wanted to make sure that the next person to come across the issue had an easier time testing than they did.

I led a workshop for Getting Involved with Drupal and was on the panel at the Flourish! Open Source Conference last weekend. Among the questions brought up there were:

• Who are new contributors?
• How can we encourage new contributors to participate in open source projects?

In Drupal, new contributor interactions are often online only at first with just a username. We do not know someones age, their experience, where they are from, etc. Are they 12 years old, a new programmer, and new to Drupal? Are they a project manager, experienced with Drupal, and contributing for the first time? Could there be special circumstances like being dyslectic, very shy, English not their first language, etc? There are many combinations possible.

How we treat them in their first interaction can make the difference between bringing in a person to our community, or pushing them away.

Since joining comm-press in March as Social Media Manager and sitebuilder, I have been trying to get to the bottom of one question: "what does comm-press want to communicate, and why?"

What comm-press is clearly communicating at the moment - from my experience as an outsider, mainly coming into contact with comm-press online and through the Drupal User Group Hamburg - is

i) "Drupal in Hamburg" is synonymous with "comm-press"

ii) With Drupal, comm-press is capable of building some impressive websites for large corporate customers

iii) comm-press is open and collaborative, and passionate about Drupal

Watch a Drupal issue being opened.

Using dreditor and the dreditor clone issue button patch an issue is created. The issue summary template is filled out, and the pattern [#NNNN] is used to link the original issue with the new one.