Well, here we are. Drupal 7's release is imminent and once again here are some statistics for folks to review. This is a truly amazing feat: over 950 people were credited in the commit messages as a contributor to Drupal 7. There were, of course, several thousand people involved in the issue queue but a mention in the commit message is reserved for people who did a serious amount of work whether that was writing code, design, reviewing, creating tests, writing text (i.e. documentation), or some other form.

Analysis of the Drupal Commit Data

Here are some items I noticed.

• There were 954 people mentioned.
• A total of 10,091 mentions in 6,117 patches means that there were about 1.6 people per patch
• The top 10 people were mentioned in 30% of the commits
• The top 20% were mentioned in 85%
• People with 3 or fewer mentions form a group that are responsible for almost 10% of the mentions; we can't discount that long tail!

If we group people together into 9 somewhat logical groupings we can see this classic distribution.

You can get the file as an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet (.ods) or from Google docs

The top 10 Drupal 7 Contributors (as measured by this method)

There are of course other measures of contributors and certain kinds of things that are not generally measured by this system. Kieran Lal's work behind the addition of testing to Drupal was mentioned), but usually things like "finding funding" and "convincing the community it's a good idea" don't get mentioned in a commit message. Similarly, a single commit message was all the evidence for the entire Bartik Theme which was hashed over by Jen Simmons and a team of great folks for several months prior to that single message.

It's clear commits to Drupal core are just one way to measure involvement (and therefore skill) with Drupal. We're of course excited about Certified To Rock as an alternative way to measure skill with Drupal that takes into account many, many more elements.

Celebrate Drupal 7's release

To celebrate the release of Drupal 7, Growing Venture Solutions is co-hosting a Drupal 7 Release Party in New York City with Treehouse Agency, Thinkdrop and a few other sponsors. The party has reached capacity, and we're very excited to be a part of this historic moment in Drupal history.

And in Denver we are sponsoring the Denver Drupal 7 Release Party which still has some more space.

You can find, or start, a Drupal 7 release party in your area.

Previous articles on this topic:

• December 2009: Contributors to Drupal 7.x - End of Code Freeze Edition
• August 2009: Contributors to Drupal 7.x - Code Freeze Looming Update
• December 2008: Drupal 7: Who is Providing Patches for the Next Release?

* These are "final" until the next commit. We might not have any more commits before the release, or we will, but even than for 7.1 and 7.2 there will of course be many more commits. This is just "really darn close."