Community Team visit

A visit from an awesome group of Umbracians!

Written by Sofie Toft Kristensen

You've probably already heard about these 2 teams. One makes Umbraco documentation friendlier by the minute, the other consists of PR gurus (PR meaning pull requests, of course 😏) handling your daily contributions to Umbraco CMS. Together they're a true Team Umbraco, if you will! Ladies and gents, for the first time ever, those 2 teams got together at Umbraco HQ and today you'll find out how it all went down:

The two teams

Last week we had a group of very special people visiting Umbraco HQ. We had invited the PR Team and the Documentation Curators to a sort of Hackathon in order to celebrate their huge contribution to Umbraco.

But before we move on, let me just give you a quick little introduction to each of the teams:

The Umbraco Documentation Curators

The Documentation Curators is a team that’s been put together to improve the “pulse” of the Umbraco Documentation repository in GitHub. The team is managing PRs, generating missing documentation and helping encourage more contributors to get involved.

The team is a collaboration between Umbraco HQ and the Umbraco community. Representing Umbraco HQ is myself and my colleague Jesper, and representing the community is Jeavon Leopold, Damiaan Peeters, and Marc Goodson. You can read much more about each of us and what we do in the Community section on Our.

The Umbraco PR Team

The PR Team, is a team much like Curators. It’s been put together to make contributing to Umbraco CMS a lot smoother, faster and rewarding for you as a contributor. The PRs here mainly being contributions to Umbraco CMS.

The team consists of Sebastiaan from Umbraco HQ and 4 people from the Umbraco community: Emma Burstow, Dave Woestenborghs, Anders Bjerner, and Poornima Nayar. If you want to learn more about this team, you should read the PR Team introduction blog post that Sebastiaan wrote back in June.

A friendly yet highly productive visit

The Documentation Curators have been working together since January (Wow, that’s almost a year now! 🤯) and the PR Team has been doing amazing things on the Umbraco CMS repository since Codegarden 18 (May).

Both teams have been doing weekly or bi-weekly meetings to coordinate and catch up, but we all know that teamwork works much better if you meet face-to-face, right?

So, that’s why we decided to bring both teams to Umbraco HQ. To celebrate their contribution and participation!

Not only did we all get to meet each other - some met IRL for the very first time! - but we also spent a lot of time talking processesses (or, processes.. 😉) and how we can improve our workflow in order to make it even easier for you guys to continue contributing to Umbraco.

The teams were here for two whole days, and boy, did we do a lot of hacking!

As I’ve already mentioned, we talked a lot about our processes, but I guess that’s a very generic term, so let me just explain that a bit more:

Basically, it involves making contributing to Umbraco better than ever!

We discussed how best to handle incoming PRs and issues, and how the two teams could be even better at collaborating. Now that we do have these two teams, it only makes sense that we sync up so that we for each new feature or bug fix in the CMS can be sure to have documentation ready for the release, right?

On top of all that, the Documentation Curators spent a great deal of time talking about how best to restructure the Getting Started section in the Documentation. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but as you can imagine, it’s quite a big task. We came up with a great plan, and when it's all finalized I'll be sure to share it with you in one of my upcoming Docs Diaries.

It was not all hard work and processes though. On Thursday we had a meetup here at Umbraco HQ. Dave Woestenborghs did a talk, and we even got to see how the Umbraco Build servers run 😉 - well, actually it was just the engines here at our offices (Dave captured the experience right here: https://twitter.com/dawoe21/status/1065643687051440135 )

“Getting together this November was a fantastic opportunity to really set in stone some processes to help us work more effectively. It was a lovely few days and so good to see the rest of the team members that we usually only chat to over Slack or steal fleeting conversations at always busy conferences. The teams came away feeling really empowered and having built some amazing tools to help us work. Up until now we'd been working pretty organically and rather than finding we needed to start again, we were ablet o build on the good work we'd already been doing. An added bonus: Odense is very pretty around Christmas time!"
Emma Burstow

So, now what?

Going forward you can expect that the way we handle your contributions will be even better, more formalized. Or, as Emma put it: “We - the teams - will be slicker and more well oiled.” 😉

When asking the team members about how the future for the two teams looks we all agreed on one thing: We want to involve the community even more!

How? By reaching out, by being better at engaging incoming PRs and Issues, by creating tools to help us manage the repositories even better…

The future, of course, also holds a lot of work around Umbraco version 8 - that goes for both teams!

And, as Dave put it: “We want to get down to 0 PRs!”

I don’t know about you, but we are all VERY excited about the future. Both teams have come really far in just one year’s(-ish) time and we can’t wait to continue to make contributions to Umbraco even more delightful for everyone!

Finally - H5YR to all the fantastic community volenteers in the two teams! 🙌