Have you heard of Drupal Core Office Hours? Do you know what they are? How about the fact that you, yes YOU can help make Drupal better every week?!

Listen in as I talk with Jess about what Drupal core office hours are, who can get involved, and what they can do to make Drupal a better CMS for everyone. Below you'll find a rather detailed outline that Jess put together.

About Jess

• xjm on drupal.org (http://drupal.org/user/65776)
• Community Spotlight: Jess (xjm) (http://drupal.org/node/1390816)
• Drupal 8 core commit mentions (http://ericduran.co/drupalcores/)

Resources for the Drupal core office hours

• Drupal core office hours (http://drupal.org/core-office-hours)
• Denver core office day (http://xjm.drupalgardens.com/blog/core-office-hours)
• @drupalcore (https://twitter.com/#!/drupalcore)
• Drupal IRC handbook (http://drupal.org/irc)
• Setting up a development environment (http://drupal.org/node/28245)

Resources for contributing to Drupal core

• Core and you! (http://xjm.drupalgardens.com/blog/core-and-you)
• Drupal core issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?categories=All)
• Novice issues (http://drupal.org/project/issues/search?status[0]=1&status[1]=8&status[2]=13&status[3]=14&status[4]=15&issue_tags_op=or&issue_tags=Novice)
• API Documentation issues (http://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?component=documentation)
• Drupal coding standards (http://drupal.org/coding-standards)

Configuration management Initiative

• Drupal core initiatives (http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core)

Office hours outline

Purpose of office hours

1. Help people work on the Drupal core issue queue
2. Onramp new contributors to core
3. Encourage experienced developers to devote time to the core queue periodically

Where and when

• #drupal IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/drupal)
• Tuesdays, 0400 UTC (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2011&mo=8&d=9&h=4&mn=0) (Note: This is Monday night in the Americas)
• Wednesdays, 1600 UTC (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2011&mo=8&d=10&h=16&mn=0)

Why

1. Drupal core developers are all volunteers (and you can be one too!)
2. There are currently over 9300 open issues filed against Drupal core, many of which need basic handling
3. Getting involved in Drupal core development can be intimidating

How

• If possible, set up a sandbox Drupal site, preferably with git (http://drupal.org/node/28245)
• Join Drupal IRC during one of the timeslots above
• Say that you’re interested in participating in office hours
• Work on one or more issues

Ways a non-developer can help

1. Get steps to reproduce
2. Triage potential contributed module issues and move to correct queues
3. Look for duplicates of issues and related issues
4. Handle or refer support requests
5. Write issue summaries

Ways to help with git

1. Help test patches
2. Improve patch code style or documentation
3. Patch novice issues