Using the Drupal 8 Contrib Tracker

In case you haven't heard about it yet, the D8 Contrib Tracker is meta-project on drupal.org that is designed to serve as a collective tracking system for the porting status of contributed modules.

As of this writing, there are 108 projects listed. A project being listed only means that somebody was interested in the module enough to track down the relevant information of porting status and post it as an "issue" to the project. But this is still helpful, because it crowd-sources the module status spreadsheets many of us have been keeping, providing a centralized place for an overview of status with links to relevant project details. It also lets developers see which modules the community is waiting for, so somebody with time to contribute can decide to work on a module that others are ready to provide testing and feedback for.

Right now, this set-up works great for Drupal's development community, but what about those of us who don't live and breathe the issue queue and only want to know about the handful of modules that are important to them? Happily there is an easier way, using some often-overlooked features of drupal.org.

Setting up a personalized Contrib Tracker issue list

  1. You will need an account on Drupal.org, and be logged in.
  2. Visit the Contrib Tracker issue status page and find the module(s) that you are interested in.
  3. Click on the issue Summary link, which will take you to the porting status page for the module:

  4. Click the "Follow" button - it is in the sidebar underneath the issue metadata summary block.
  5. Repeat for steps 2 through 4 for each module that you want to personally track.
  6. To build out your customized list, visit the Contrib Tracker issue status Advanced Search page, and fill out the "Followers" field with your username. Then click "Search" to update the view:

  7. Bookmark this page for future use.