For someone who is not a programmer or is starting how can he/she contribute to Drupal.org?

Question

I have been talking to people who are starting in the university about Drupal. But they are beginners in programming. so they told me how they can contribute to Drupal or being more involved.

What would be the best advice for them to contribute..or how they can start if they have limited program skills? Do you have any advice?

Answer 1

Both @David and @Patrick have put well on the ways to contribute to the Drupal community. I think a good place to evaluate yourself and start contributing would be at Drupal Ladder.
It was a result of the work from the folks from Boston, who came together and started something called Boston initiative where they come together and work on contributing.

You can look at the ladder screenshot below :

If one wishes to contribute, s/he is suggested to follow these steps starting from the bottom and climbing the ladder one step at a time.

You can also view the session about Drupal ladder at DrupalCon Denver.

P.S.: The Drupal Ladder was designed to encourage users to contribute to Drupal core and not focus on contributing towards the modules (contributed).

Answer 2

There are many ways to contribute to the open-source Drupal project.

For example:

• http://drupal.org/new-contributors and
• http://drupal.org/node/1424456 for details on:

• Contributor task: Add keywords to a Community Documentation page
• Contributor task: Add new content
• Contributor task: Add screenshots for a Drupal issue
• Contributor task: Answer a support forum question
• Contributor task: Assess and clean up a Documentation issue
• Contributor task: Document mobile CMS interfaces
• Contributor task: Document steps to reproduce a reported issue
• Contributor task: Handle or refer a support request in an issue
• Contributor task: Manually do Accessibility testing of a patch for a Drupal issue
• Contributor task: Manually test a patch for a Drupal issue
• Contributor task: Verify a reported issue

Further information can be found here: http://drupal.org/contribute

Answer 3

I am not much of a programmer myself, but one way I contribute is to read through the issue queues of contributed modules that I have experience with. In the issue queues, there are many support requests from inexperienced Drupal users that I am able to answer, even without programming knowledge. I would imagine that the module maintainers appreciate this, because I bet that they would rather spend their time improving their modules than answering basic questions from new users.

Also, in the issue queues, one often finds multiple bug reports on the same issue. Closing duplicates and writing summaries for issue threads that have grown extremely long can help bugs get solved even if you yourself do not have the programming skills to fix them. Further, this gives one great insight into what a helpful bug report is (and how not to write a bug report!)

To get started, check out the guide for how to use the issue queues.

Answer 4

Lullabot has an article about why writing documentation makes a great deal of sense for beginners in Drupal and/or development.

Answer 5

Triaging large issue queues by identifying duplicate issues and issues that are filed against the wrong project, and following the guidelines for helping maintainers is always helpful and almost anyone can do it.