Two Million Downloads and Counting

Drupal Console has achieved a significant milestone, surpassing two million downloads. This comes less than a year after the project celebrated its first million downloads.

Reaching the first million downloads was a nearly four-year effort that built considerable trust within the community. At that time, the project was at version 1.0.0-rc23, with the team working diligently toward an official release ahead of DrupalCon Vienna. While the initial goal was to launch version 1.0.0 by DrupalCon Dublin, the release timeline ultimately mirrored the development path of Drupal 8.

What has happened since the stable 1.x version was released?

To improve community inclusion, support for the Russian language has been added.

For community engagement, the project website underwent a recent redesign. The goal was to simplify the user experience with a more intuitive interface. The documentation section was also improved, giving greater visibility to language maintainers. Additionally, a mailing list was established to share new features and project news with users.

Improving user support was another key focus. Drupal Console is a community project with backing from weKnow, the company that initiated it. A new support section has been added, allowing the community to connect with other users and maintainers through channels like Github, Gitter, and Slack.

Companies requiring commercial support now have an option to connect directly with the maintainers and co-maintainers. This type of support can cover areas such as:

• Requesting custom features.
• Sponsoring a new feature to contribute back to the community.
• Understanding and implementing a Drupal Console workflow for a multi-layer development team.

On the technical side, notable features and internal changes include:

• Enhanced automation using chain commands.
• A `composerize` command to assist in converting a non-Composer Drupal codebase to a Composer-managed one.
• Added support for importing previously exported configurations with the `config:import` command.
• An upgrade to Symfony 3.x.
• Integration of Twig support within chain commands.
• A simplified contributor onboarding process, with new commands available in the development repository to assist with common tasks.

What's next?

Leading up to the 2.0 release, the project's focus will be on improving and expanding test case coverage to ensure greater stability for production environments.

Work is also underway in the area of workflows, particularly for development and deployment, to streamline the entire lifecycle of Drupal sites.

What can be expected in version 2.0? The plan is to align its release with the launch of Drupal 9. It is important to account for the refactoring that is occurring around publishing and content authoring.

Just as with Drupal 8, the Drupal Console team aims to continue evolving the tool to genuinely enhance development cycles.

Finally, a sincere thank you is extended to all past, present, and future contributors to the Drupal Console project since version 1.0.